Tribeca Review: Descent

A nasty little revenge fantasy, Descent would have critics up in arms if there was still any notion -- as there was back in the days when Pauline Kael bashed Dirty Harry -- that movies have enough of a stranglehold over popular thinking that they must be confronted and repelled if they lapse into a fascist mentality. The film, which premiered at this year's Tribeca film festival, stars Rosario Dawson as a college-aged student named Maya, who finds herself being aggressively talked into a sexual situation by a football player named Jared (Chad Faust) who won't take no for an answer. No, seriously -- he won't take no for an answer. After improbably luring Maya into a basement bedroom fit for Jame Gumm, Jared proceeds to violently rape her while whispering racial slurs into her ear. The movie is set up in a very deliberate three-act structure, with the brutal rape scene closing the curtain on act one, not to mention Maya's innocence. Although the first and third act constitute the main action of the film, it's the second that's most intriguing.

After a first act, which confines itself to a very short timespan -- maybe a couple of days -- the second act follows what we presume to be Maya's long journey toward recovery from her ordeal. On summer vacation from school, she gets a job at a local Gap-like store and takes to spending her nights engaging in act-out behavior like pill-popping and random sex in ecstasy-fueled party scenes. The film, which was co-written and directed by longtime Dawson collaborator Talia Lugacy, throws us off completely by not giving us any kind of clues or signals as to where the second act is going. Are we watching a romantic drama about a woman who suffers a random tragedy and has to learn to love and trust again? Are we watching a movie about a woman who starts out as a normal college student and lapses into a world of high-risk behavior? Unless you have foreknowledge, you really don't know where you're being taken through most of the middle section of the film, which is a credit to Lugacy.

The film isn't perfect, by any stretch -- it would have us believe, for example, that the rapist pulls stunts like this on a regular basis, and no one ever seems to call the police afterwards. Also, given the film's insistence on setting up Dawson's character in particular as a very verbal, outspoken woman who likes to debate a point, it's hard to understand how she would suddenly retreat into a shell after being sexually assaulted. She seems more like the type who would have already formed a women's group to educate the public about sexual violence issues by the time the police arrived. Because the film swings through many different moods, Dawson has to more or less adjust her character to fit each scene, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. The dialogue is also sometimes perfunctory, although at other times it gets the point across in a succinct way and doesn't shy away from the tough language. Faust's character, in particular, is handled reasonably well, dialogue-wise -- you can believe that a narcissistic rapist would say some of the things he says.

In spite of the challenges, Dawson shows here -- as she's shown before -- that she's a competent actress who can pull off the whole light-comedy thing as well as delve into more layered dramatic performances. Still, her career seems to have an odd non-direction to it, as she moves back and forth from the fanboy world, in projects like Clerks II and Sin City to big, impersonal productions like Rent and The Adventures of Pluto Nash, to smaller, more personal efforts like this film, which she produced and nursed from the very beginning of its existence. As for Lugacy, her only credit prior to this film was a short called Little Black Dress, also starring Dawson, so she has yet to prove herself outside of working with her famous producer, star and financial backer, but based on some of the interesting choices she makes in Descent, I'd say that she probably has an interesting career ahead of her. What she's made her is certainly a brave film, if not one that is going to sit well with a lot of audiences.

I'll say nothing about the third act, except to expound on what I've already told you -- that it's a revenge film. I have no doubt that the filmmakers would deny they are espousing any kind of point of view with it, just telling a story, which is perfectly fine -- I applaud that -- but I think it will be interesting to see if any critics decide to call the film out for endorsing vigilante justice or, in effect, condoning the depiction of violence as catharsis. Despite the re-emergence of the horror genre in the past few years, the outcry against violence in films has continued to grow, unabated. Descent was undoubtedly a tough project to make, and it's tough to watch, and it's going to be a tough project to get distributed. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in theaters a year from now with a dramatically altered ending, but even if that happens, you still have to give the director and producer some credit for trying to single-handedly bring back the gritty, grimy revenge genre.