Emerald Fennell’s Anatomy of Desire

For the follow-up to her acclaimed and controversial début feature film, “Promising Young Woman,” the writer and director Emerald Fennell (also well known as an actor on “The Crown”) has made a dark satire of not just aristocracy but our collective preoccupation with it. “Saltburn” follows a college student who joins a wealthy classmate at his family’s mysterious old country estate, which the director shot as “a sex object.” Fennell is very familiar with this world—albeit from a distance. Her father was a jeweller who sold work to Elton John and Madonna, and Fennell went to the same boarding school as Kate Middleton. “As a female filmmaker, more than any other kind, you’re expected to be a memoirist. People are more comfortable with that,” she tells The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. Her previous film, “Promising Young Woman,” about a woman’s attempt to hold a rapist accountable, had an extremely dark ending that infuriated many viewers, but that Fennell found to be more honest. “I don’t think of myself as a liar at all. I hope I’m very honest—but that’s what a liar would say.”

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