Eileen

Director: William Oldroyd (USA, UK, South Korea). Year of Release: 2023

1960s. A road in the wilds of Massachusetts. A young woman in a car is watching a couple making out in a car opposite. After watching for a while, she opens the car door and picks up a clump of snow lying on the ground outside. Back in the car, she thrusts the snow between her legs. Some reviews make the implausible claim that she is masturbating with the snow. Much more likely, she is trying to cool down her incipient desire.

Eileen is 24 but looks much younger. She went to college for a while, but returned home when her mother got ill, and got a job in the local juvenile jail. After her mother died, she stayed to look after her dad. He was a World War II soldier, then a cop, but was sacked. He says it was because he was too good for them, but whatever the reason, he’s now taken to daytime drinking and waving a gun at passing schoolkids. Eileen’s sister got married and left town as soon as she could.

Because of her lack of qualifications, Eileen works as a quasi-secretary, where the other workers – mainly older women – treat her with disdain. Occasionally she fantasises about sex with the young guard with whom she rarely if ever talks, but her life is mainly solitary. At home, her father denigrates her in between drunken fits, saying that some people are like main movie characters. “Other people, they just take up space and you take them for granted. That’s you, Eileen.”

Then, a new psychiatrist arrives in the jail. We hear about Rebecca St. John before we see her. A group of male prison workers (ie most of the prison workers) look forward to possible future encounters. Even in her presence, she is introduced as being “easy on the eyes, but I assure you, she’s very smart”. Even then, the warden who’s introducing her says she’s from (the women’s University) Radcliffe when in fact she graduated at the much more prestigious Harvard.

Rebecca is a bottle blonde chain smoker, who “shouldn’t smoke, but I do”. Above all she is self-confident and takes no shit. Rebecca is the role model who Eileen has always been looking for – articulate when Eileen has always struggled to express herself. She is possibly the first person ever to show interest in what Eileen thinks and feels. Trying to emulate Rebecca, Eileen takes up smoking, coffee and red wine, struggling at first, but slowly accustoming herself to her new vices.

One night, Rebecca invites Eileen to a bar. She’s new in town and would like some company. Which bar serves the best cocktails? As there’s only one bar in town, that question is easily answered. Rachel showers, shaves her legs and puts on one of her mother’s old dresses (she doesn’t buy her own clothes). She is overjoyed to spend time with the charismatic psychiatrist, even more so after one of the guys in the bar comes on to her too strongly and Rebecca lamps him one,

While Eileen is clearly in love with Rebecca on all sorts of levels – she both wants to be her and be with her – Rebecca’s feelings towards Eileen are much more ambiguous. Obviously, she is bored and sees a kindred spirit in the younger woman. But is it love? Besides which, there is an uneasy power dynamic between the two women, at least at first. Could it be that Rebecca is just revelling in the fact that Eileen clearly thinks that she is wonderful?

A sub-plot emerges with Lee Polk, one of the prison inmates convicted of multiply stabbing his cop father. When someone remarks, scandalised, that he tried to kill a cop, Eileen corrects them: no, he tried to kill his father. That’s different”. When discussing the case with Rebecca, Eileen casually asks “doesn’t everyone want to murder their father”. The film is interspersed with moments of Eileen’s inner thoughts letting rip.

For different reasons, Rebecca and Eileen pursue Polk’s case, inviting his mother into the prison for a chat. Initially, she cannot endure the meeting with her son, leaving the room while calling him a “filthy, nasty boy”. She is unable to communicate with him. And yet It becomes increasingly obvious that the murder was the result of sexual abuse, with the encouragement, or at the very least the complicity, of his damaged mother.

It is a sheer coincidence that I saw Eileen the day after I saw Todd Haynes’s Carol for the first time in years. There is much to compare and contrast between the two films, and not just on the superficial keel that they both feature (possibly) lesbian relationships in a historical setting. But one great difference between the films is the power relationship between its protagonists. Whereas the balance in Carol remains relatively stable, in Eileen we witness a significant shift.

For most of the film, Eileen is a timid ingenue and Rebecca a self-confident woman around town (even if this particular town doesn’t offer many places to go). Then, with about half an hour to go, Something Happens. Rebecca calls Eileen and invites her to visit her at home. Of course Eileen does, but this time she’s wearing red lipstick. If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time in the entire film we see her clearly wearing any make up. From this moment on, Eileen starts to take control.

If you want to know any more, you should see the film yourself – and really you should go and see it. The final half hour contains a tonal shift which both jolts you and is entirely plausible. The once mousey Eileen has suddenly grown up. Director William Oldroyd has the confidence in his actors and characters to be able to show that the Eileen who we encounter at the beginning of the film is not the same as the one we see at the end. She finally escapes her claustrophobic home town.

I must admit, that I came into this film as someone who wasn’t a great Anne Hathaway fan. I couldn’t say for definite what she’d been in, but wasn’t it mainly brainless romcoms? I can’t really be bothered to find out, but here she is excellent. But not as excellent as Thomasin McKenzie as Eileen. It’s maybe better to say that they play off each other. The (initially) extrovert Rebecca and (initially) introvert Eileen bring out the best from each other.

In 1998, Cannes jointly gave the Best Actress award (as it was then called) to Élodie Bouchez and Natacha Régnier, co-stars of The Dreamlife of Angels, one of my favourite films ever. The logic was that although both actors gave superlative performances, these were better seen as a joint contribution. I don’t expect this from the Oscars – I don’t even expect that the best talent will be rewarded, but at least we can acknowledge the superb contribution of both Hathaway and McKenzie.