Miller’s Girl (Jade Halley Bartlett, 2024)
Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman lock horns in Miller’s Girl, the highly promising debut feature from writer and director Jade Halley Bartlett.
It’s like this: Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega, Wednesday) is a precocious 18-year old from Tennessee, who has dreams of becoming a literary writer. Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) is her middle-aged literature teacher, who in a previous life wrote one collection of short stories, before giving up the ghost and settling down as a teacher. All the while married to Jennifer (Dagmara Dominczyk), who over the years has become a much more successful writer than Jonathan ever was. And their marriage is over the hill anyway.
Cairo has a best friend in Winnie (Gideon Adlon), who convinces her to pursue Mr. Miller, while she herself flirts quite openly with physical education teacher Boris (Bashir Salahuddin).
Cairo is attracted to Jonathan’s status and the idea that he might be able to give her a leg up in the literary world, while Jonathan falls in love with her talent and, well, the fact that she looks like Jenna Ortega.
They start something they cannot really finish, and when he breaks it off rather callously, she exacts a kind of cruel revenge, by way of slipping her writing assignment - a rather explicit love story in the vein of her favorite writer Henry Miller about a teacher and and his student - to the school’s vice-principal.
In this day and age there is only one way this could possibly end, and even if Jonathan might actually get another book out of his downfall, he may have to self-publish it.
So it’s clear who the villain of the story is, or is it? Jonathan is the adult in the room and he definitely should know better. But Cairo isn’t completely blameless either. She is in a manipulative phase she may one day grow out of - or she may become a full-blown sociopath like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.
Jade Halley Bartlett makes it perfectly clear that in the war between the sexes no one is one hundred percent innocent.
Shot like a true Southern gothic romance, complete with a heightened sense of reality, Miller’s Girl is a visually lush production, that thematically borrows liberally from Lolita to American Beauty and from Dangerous Liaisons to Cruel Intentions.
The story arc may be fairly predictable, following the rules of attraction, til the beautiful young woman is scorned and the (anti-)hero takes a fall, but the story itself is rich and layered (‘it’s layered’ is actually what Cairo says when Jonathan rejects her story on the grounds that it’s too explicit) and contains some wonderful dialogue.
When early on Cairo appears from the woods next to the school, in a way that reminded me of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, Jonathan and Boris politely inquire if it doesn’t scare her to be there alone. To which she replies: ‘I’m the scariest thing in those woods.’
And so Jade Halley Bartlett immediately makes it clear who the wolf is in her movie, and who the sheep.
Note: After its world premiere at the Palm Springs Festival and a subsequent US release, Miller’s Girl is making its way around the world. Currently the movie is in theaters in Germany, Australia, The Netherlands and Portugal.