Fair Play
Directed by Chloe Domont
Running time: 1hr53 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play
Remember Disclosure? That slab of mid-Nineties multiplex titillation, starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, that tricked out its heavy-breathing corporate conflict with supposedly cutting-edge VR plot points? When I was 11, the poster — with a stiletto-heeled, skirt-raising Moore pushing Douglas up against an office wall, over the enduring tagline “Sex is power” — made an indelible impression, epitomising the dark promises of forbidden adult cinema. Little did I know how silly it was. But the image wafted into my mind while watching Chloe Domont’s distinctly non-silly debut Fair Play, a tense, icy-hot boardroom psychodrama that could be marketed under the reverse slogan: Power is sex, or at least, in the increasingly fraught relationship between two Wall Street analysts climbing the ladder at different paces, it begins to determine it rather coldly.
A nifty, witty early sequence in the film maps out the morning routine of newly engaged, exceedingly handsome couple Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich), as they wake in their chicly minimalist Manhattan apartment, get dressed in mutually dark, sharp businesswear and head off separately to work — before arriving promptly at the same high-rise hedge-fund office, where they keep a cool distance. Workplace romances are verboten in this brutally professional environment; their hope is that they’ll both reach a point of seniority in the company where they can bend the rules. But when Emily unexpectedly gets promoted ahead of Luke, the plan falters: his professions of boyfriendly pride can’t mask his bitterly disappointed envy, while the ingrained misogyny of corporate culture pecks away at her in other ways. Nothing can end well, we begin to sense, even if Emily gets exactly she wants.
Many have labelled Fair Play an erotic thriller — a genre for which cinephiles have become nostalgic in a way we couldn’t have imagined in its sleek pre-millennium heyday — and I suppose, in a sense, it is: Domont intelligently navigates the ways in which Emily and Luke’s carnal relations both reflect and impact on their forking life paths, and modernises matters with frank bodily nuances and feminist insights that weren’t so in fashion thirty-odd years ago. (Menstrual blood plays a key role in one particularly vivid, intimate scene.)
I’m not sure that I’d call the film erotic, however, even as it offers the spectacle of two beautiful people getting it on, or attempting to: its interests lie less in those pleasures than in the ways the characters spar and repel each other, and how their theoretical desire rests on gender roles no longer fit for purpose. Dynevor (freed from the corseted restraints of TV’s Bridgerton) and Ehrenreich (finally returning to sinuous, interesting acting after an ill-fated Han Solo detour) are both superb, nailing the precise, ever-plunging temperature of their characters’ passive-aggressive chemistry — two people who have it all, and leave us wanting none of it. The horny devils of Disclosure didn’t know quite how good they had it.
FAIR PLAY (2023) Written by Chloe Domont | Shot by Menno Mans | Edited by Franklin Peterson
In cinemas now and streaming on Netflix from next Friday.