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When a successful stage play is transferred to the screen, the typical concern is how much to “open it out” for the new medium: too little, and you wonder why they bothered; too much, and you lose the electric intimacy
that galvanized audiences in the first place. It’s to the credit of “Prima Facie,” director Susanna White’s earnestly impassioned film of Australian playwright Suzie Miller’s recent West End and Broadway hit, that anyone unacquainted with the material would hardly guess that it originated as a one-woman show. Set in the lofty, intricately hierarchical world of London law, it feels convincingly populated, with a clear, embedded sense of place; it moves at a decent clip, only giving into stagy speechifying in the final stretch.
And the subject matter still grabs you by the collar: Reflecting on the shattering psychological impact of rape, and the long odds of bringing perpetrators to justice even from within the legal system, it lands in U.K. cinemas this week at a particularly timely moment — as the high-profile conviction of Russell Brand marks an all-too-rare victory for sexual assault survivors.
It’s just a shame it isn’t a better movie. Miller’s adaptation of her own play runs hot and cold, as splitting the source’s theatrical stream-of-consciousness flow into dialogue and running interior monologue yields mixed rewards. There’s some awfully heavy-handed writing here, but elsewhere the script is intelligently conceived — the contrast between inner and outer voices defines the dual consciousness and everyday code-switching of protagonist Tessa Ensler, a working-class Black woman and Cambridge-educated barrister defying her lack of born privilege to swiftly rise through the ranks. And Cynthia Erivo, inheriting a virtuoso role that won Jodie Comer a Tony and an Olivier, does a creditable job with it — most powerfully in the film’s middle stretch, which offers a raw-nerved, pain-racked study of PTSD in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault.
What scuppers proceedings, however, is White’s stiff, literal-minded direction, which too frequently cheapens the writing with aggressively on-the-nose imagery, while rhythmically and aesthetically, the filmmaking tends toward the flatly televisual.
Alarm bells sound as early as the opening shot, which tracks the glittery black sneakers on Tessa’s feet as she heads to court, the skittering hip-hop beat of Ciara and Missy Elliot’s track “Move” filling the soundtrack via her personal headphones. It’s an effective enough visual and aural cue that Tessa’s roots are far removed from this stuffy realm of white men and white wigs. It probably doesn’t need the accompanying cutaways to various dusty portraits of said men in said wigs on the walls, least of all when Tessa’s aforementioned inner monologue is already articulating that difference, identifying the silver-spoon elites who dominate her profession as “thoroughbreds.” And we certainly don’t need, in the midst of this speech, cutaways to images of actual thoroughbred horses; mere minutes in, “Prima Facie” betrays a strange lack of confidence in its own cinematic storytelling.
Tessa may not be like the others — a pointed choice has been made not to conceal Erivo’s own elaborate piercings and many ornate tattoos, which extend onto her hands — but, as her opening voiceover somewhat redundantly underlines, “I’m here too.” And she’s getting noticed for all the right reasons: Her impressive performances at the Old Bailey have seen her surge past many of her current chambers peers in status and demand, while she’s being courted by a more prestigious practice. Her main reason to stay put is her posh, charming colleague Julian (Daniel Ings), with whom she has flirtatious chemistry that blooms, one evening, into after-hours office sex. “I want this,” Tessa says internally as they get down to business — subtlety is rarely the film’s strong point.
Still, “Prima Facie” is keenly and commendably focused on the specific politics of consent in intercourse, observing the differing dynamics in three separate encounters between the same two people. In the second, after a boozy dinner date, Tessa takes Julian back to her place, and the sex is joyfully hot and heavy; in the third, mere hours later, he takes advantage of her queasy, semi-conscious state to force himself upon her.
It’s a scene exactly as discomfiting as it needs to be, played with unvarnished candor by both actors — and again overegged by White’s direction, with banal images of broken glass repeatedly inserted into the action, while doomily percussive scoring by Isobel Waller-Bridge threatens to take matters into “Law & Order: SVU” territory. None of these flourishes has as much impact as Erivo’s numb, hollowed-out physicality in the scenes following the rape — as Tessa reports Daniel to the police the very next morning, and faces an irrevocably changed future.
From here, the film shifts into predominantly procedural mode. Tessa, who has defended the accused in many a sexual assault case before, suddenly finds the shoe on the other foot — all her favored legal tactics and loopholes now turned against her as she accepts the near-impossibility of proving her case in her own professional sphere. “Prima Facie” thus never seems likely to develop into a rousing courtroom drama, though its more interesting, bitterly ironic dramatic potential is also curtailed. Tessa’s arc stops short of a difficult moral reckoning with her chosen career, while latent domestic conflicts remain as such — in particular, her passive-aggressive relationship with her steadfast mother (an excellent Noma Dumezweni), a cleaner who fears her daughter will undo all her social self-elevation by going public with the case.
Instead, the film’s big dramatic swing is an unconvincing swerve back to the play’s original format — as a despondent Tessa takes the stand to argue for systemic change on behalf of all survivors like her who have struggled to be heard in a court of law. It’s a showy, declamatory climax, delivered with poised fury by Erivo. But if the message is on point, the scene doesn’t quite ring true: It’s perhaps the moment when “Prima Facie” feels least engaged with the reality of all women in Tessa’s position, and most concerned with engineering a theatrical triumph for its indubitably impressive heroine. Even for one of Britain’s brightest young barristers, the only win here can be a rhetorical one.
