Saltburn’s Transgressive Phoniness

Is Saltburn an example of how Hollywood diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) policies guarantee inferior filmmaking? It’s the latest anti-male film written and directed by Englishwoman Emerald Fennell (known for 2021’s Promising Young Woman and TV’s Killing Eve), whose only cultural contribution is taking advantage of tokenism and abusing it. (She could be auditioning to be president of an Ivy League university.)

In Saltburn, named for the estate where feckless scion Felix (Jacob Elordi) brings his social-climbing Oxford classmate Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), Fennell attacks the British aristocracy. It’s her progressive-feminist way of promoting social revolution and sexual license. She references Kubrick’s portrayal of the decadent gentry in Barry Lyndon, turning its natural light into shadowy noir, even copying its enormous topiary maze where police get lost and never discover Quick’s foul intentions to destroy the family of haughty eccentrics.

Quick is not a rebel, he’s a psychopath who resents yet covets all institutions. He’s not “quick,” either. Keoghan seemed to be acting retarded in last year’s The Banshees of Inisherin, but he doesn’t seem to be acting anymore. Fennell simply prefers showing introverted abnormality, at first teasing Quick’s sexual attraction to Felix, then his sinister designs on the entire household: the aloof father (Richard E. Grant), the bulimic daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver), the biracial cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), and especially the campy mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike).

Using Quick as a vehicle for phony transgression, Fennell makes him a figure of perverse identification. Quick hides his middle-class background, passing as a son of drug dealers who miraculously makes it to Oxford, where boys flirt with boys, unfazed by pansexuality. Fennell excuses deviancy as social maladjustment. Her trickery reveals the glib politics of a generation that has inherited casual unearned license. Mental defective Quick is its hero, and Fennell wants to be its ringleader.

Fennell mucks about with age-old class-consciousness — without which trite British filmmakers might have no consciousness at all. Fennell exploits class issues as well as race and gender preoccupations, combining them when an Oxford mean girl snipes that dorky Quick “looks like he buys his clothes at Oxfam” and, later, when Quick seduces Venetia during menstruation: “Lucky for you, I’m a vampire.”

Would a male filmmaker get away with Fennell’s obscenity? Ignorant reviewers are unfazed by her vulgar imitations of Daphne Du Maurier, Evelyn Waugh, Joe Orton, all the Angry Young Man plays, and virtually the entire plot of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema. But Pasolini understood the spiritual agony of perversion and transcended it. When Quick slurps Felix’s bathwater as it drains, Saltburn becomes an idiot-atheist’s version of the extraordinary Teorema.

Fennell, with feminist sarcasm, pilfers from superior male artists. It’s blatantly offensive to see the family doing karaoke to the 1987 Pet Shop Boys song “Rent.” Quick ducks the rent-boy lyric that exposes his sexual manipulation, yet Fennell cuts away just when Farleigh enjoys the song — simply to deny its brilliance, which has lasted into the millennium, and to give Fennell her too-obvious point. (Fennell has no real feeling for pop music; it’s left to Andrew Haigh to reclaim Pet Shop Boys in All of Us Strangers.) Next, Fennell appropriates Pulp’s 1995 “Common People” and then trashes it, stupidly: The flighty mother played by actressy Pike claims to be the inspiration for “Common People,” one of Britpop’s most stinging class satires. If that’s not bad enough, Fennell shows Quick masturbating on Felix’s grave to a hymn, a disgusting denial of grace.

Films about English class privilege used to be sane, continuing a proud tradition. Now the worst people in Hollywood make films about the worst people in the world (those who pretend to be anti-fascist yet are fascist themselves). Fennell sells attitude (“We’re all cold-blooded, haven’t you noticed?”) to replace knowledge and feeling. Fennell’s a cultural menace. The title Saltburn already gives away her bias and lack of imagination. Rugburn would be more appropriate.