Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall star in a comedy-drama about a couple venturing out of the bounds of monogamy.
Good Deed Entertainment
Rebecca Hall's new film is not meant to be seen as an instruction manual for revitalizing long-term relationships.
"Permission,"
now playing in select cinemas and available via video-on-demand
outlets, is the story of a couple — played by Hall and Dan Stevens — who
decide to open up their relationship before taking the seemingly
inevitable plunge into marriage and home ownership.
"It
makes me laugh, because it’s definitely not a textbook on how to have
an open relationship," Hall said. "I know people in open relationships
and this is an absolute textbook on how to do it terribly.
"I
mean, they don’t set any ground rules, they don’t do it ethically, they
don’t talk to each other properly about it. I mean, it’s a mess, and
that’s very deliberate."
Hall,
who also produced "Permission," said writer and director Brian Crano
"wanted to make a film that looked like a conventional rom-com in the
sense of that sort of classic period in the '90s, when everything looked
like incredibly glossy and glamorous and there were all these backdrops
of the New York skyline in every shot.
"There was a
deliberate attempt to make these people, for want of a better word,
boujee and glamorous and living in inexplicably nice apartments. But
then, just as soon as you feel like you know where you are, then it
slowly subverts all those expectations."
One
of the film's crucial acts of subversion is the decision to have Anna,
Hall's character, be the one to initially propose that she and Will,
Steven's character, try sleeping with other people.
“Brian
really wanted to tell a story about a woman with sexual agency who
didn’t know that she had it yet and was working out how to have it and
was being brave and doing things which culturally one might view as sort
of unlikable or shocking," Hall said.
Ultimately,
Hall said that "Permission" is "not actually about open
relationships. It’s also about what it takes to question a relationship
that is basically good. ... Even in these very sophisticated,
progressive, enlightened times that we live in, I still think there is a
weird pressure, especially on women, that if you’re in a relationship
that’s fine for God’s sake stay in that relationship, don’t question it,
because if you leave it you might be a failure, which is crazy."
Hall
has been friends with both Crano and Stevens for more than a decade,
and they were joined in the film by Hall's husband, Morgan Spector,
and Crano's husband, David Joseph Craig, who play another long-term
couple on the film.
Together, this quintet joined
forces to make a film about, as Hall said, "a woman who starts to
realize that even though she’s turning 30 and is sort of on the brink of
adulthood — as probably that is now is, turning 30, shocking as that
sounds — she has no idea who she is and she hasn’t grown up at all and
she’s lost and she’s basically a mess. So let’s try and make a film
where she works that out through making bold, to her, transgressive
sexual decisions."
"Permission"
serves as a compelling companion piece of sorts to "Professor Marston
and the Wonder Women," Hall's 2017 film about the polyamorous love story
which changed comic books and global culture as a whole.
Hall
discussed why current audiences seem to be connecting with these
handsomely produced looks at non-traditional love and non-monogamous
relationships.
LOCAL HERO: Danny DeVito announces Asbury Park homecoming
“Increasingly,
we’re living in a world where it’s acceptable and normal to do things
however you want to do them," Hall said. "There’s not an appropriate way
to do something, relationship-wise.
"There are
many different ways to have good, healthy relationships and I think
there’s a lack of stories that reflect that in the cultural thinking, so
these stories are sort of lapped up because they feel like they’re
filling the space. I think we need those examples; there are many
different ways to do things.”
Comments
Post a Comment