CW: This piece briefly discusses sexual harassment and assault.
A few weeks ago, I was sexually harassed for the first time. I boarded a Red Line train midday on a Tuesday. Shortly after I sat down, a man sat next to me, pulled out his penis and began masturbating as he stared at me.
There were around five people in the car with me, no more than a few feet away. I made eye contact with one of them. They saw the man pin me to the wall as he pressed his penis into my hand. Nobody spoke. Nobody intervened. Everyone watched.
This experience came to mind during a screening of director Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence.” The film features a scene where a young woman is drugged and almost raped. The central conceit of the film is that of a ghost story shot entirely from the perspective of said ghost. In that harrowing scene, our helplessness as an audience is personified through this disembodied being, floating around in a panic as it cannot do anything to help a young girl in trouble. It (we) can only watch.
Director Steven Soderbergh’s newest cinematic experiment is a harrowing family drama that occasionally dips into horror as a reminder of our own culpability in choosing to avoid getting involved with uncomfortable situations at the expense of others.
The film’s premise is deceitfully simple: a family moves into a new home after teen girl Chloe (Callina Liang) experiences the death of a close friend. Her pragmatic yet distant mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu), dotes over her hard-headed brother, Tyler (Edday Maday), while her troubled father, Chris (Chris Sullivan), tries to keep the family together as Chloe’s public mourning strains their tenuous relationship. As the specter learns more about their lives as a voyeur, witnessing domestic disputes and the moments where they believe they’re alone, Chloe and the rest of the family take notice, and they continue to fall apart as their worldviews are challenged.
Legendary screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Panic Room,” “Spider-Man”) crafts an archetypal ghost tale which remains effective due to economical and empathetic storytelling. Within a meager 85-minute run time, Koepp chips away at these somewhat stock characters until they’re fully explored.
Despite the star power in its main cast, the real protagonist is the frame itself. Shot and edited by Soderbergh, our main character is nameless, faceless and voiceless, yet I feel for them more deeply than some films where the central character never leaves our sight. There is a gut-wrenching sadness in the way the camera lingers on the rare moments of love between the family — it may be able to live vicariously through the people it watches, but it can never receive that love itself.
Unlike someone like Brian DePalma, Soderbergh’s voyeuristic tendencies extend only to revealing the ensemble’s hidden emotions. When Chloe undresses or has sex, the camera pans away, as though to give that character some respect and steal any perverse titillation the audience may receive from seeing a teen girl naked. There’s a marked understanding of women as victims of misogyny yet also real people.
Film theorist Laura Mulvey’s essay on the male gaze is clearly on this movie’s mind. The men, with a single exception, are emotionally immature cowards, only provoked into action when pushed by the women around them. The women, especially Chloe, are empathetic to a fault, resulting in constant victimization by those who would be surrogates for the male audience in another kind of story. Even Rebecca, portrayed as cold and uncaring, suffers because of her obsession with making her son succeed despite his lack of drive and her fear of being seen as weak for caring for her daughter.
Despite the thick fog of grief hanging over the story, love’s persistence through conflict and even death is what drives these characters. Soderbergh is prolific; he’s been a part of 21 projects in the last five years alone. It’s likely this film, smaller in scope than some of his other projects, may be forgotten or overlooked when observing the full breadth of his work.
Nonetheless, that love — both for cinema and for the characters he crafts — is felt here. I will remember that.
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