In the world of director Shana Feste’s Run Sweetheart Run (2020) men are despicable acolytes of evil, mindless servants of the demon misogyny.
Personally, I’m not sure it plays the way she intended.
Single mother Cherie (Ella Balinska) is having a bad day. She made a complaint about a senior colleague’s inappropriate comments, and is now getting the corporate smooth-down. Then, while some sweaty guy gets handsy with her on a bus, her boss calls. Apparently she screwed up and double-booked his evening. His solution for this calendar blunder, she should go in his stead.
Later that evening a nervous and menstruating Cherie arrives at the palatial home of the ever so charming, somewhat coy, Ethan (Pilou Asbaek). They talk, flirt over sushi, then he convinces her to join him for a nightcap. As she ignores her instincts and accepts his invitation, Ethan breaks the fourth wall. In the time it takes her to cross the threshold and go inside, he glance at the camera. His smirk says a lot, not least “I’m about to do something horrible but you can’t watch…” accompanied by the glee of knowing “…there’s nothing you can do to stop me”.
A beat later, all cuts and bloody, Cherie is running down the street barefoot. When she finally gets someone to help her, they reluctantly call the police. But the police-men are more concerned with arresting her for public intoxication than anything that’s been done to her. Banged up and desperate for a tampon, some clumsy exposition from a cellmate warns, “the same thing happened to my bestie”. She advises her to run, find the First Lady.
Then Ethan is let into her cell. As he casually toys with her, tells her he’s going to enjoy chasing her, it’s clear he’s more than some rich psychopath.
As the plot kicks in, and Cherie does her best to escape Ethan, we slowly realise he’s some kind of supernatural entity, a demon, and he’s using the smell of her menstrual blood to track her. As is usual in these things, anyone who helps Cherie is killed, but Feste does something interesting by keeping most of the violence off screen. We see the aftermath, the dead bodies, the blood, but not the act. This rule gets broken but the violence is in the cut, the ejaculation, the splat of carnage on screen.
When Cherie gets desperate enough, and finally takes notice of the very art directed posters that have peppered her route since the start, she calls the First Lady (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Here more clumsy exposition reveals misogyny is a a battle between good and evil, angels and the devil, and Cherie is the only one to survive this close to morning. The First Lady wants to use Cherie as bait to lure the devil, put an end to his misogynistic reign forever, by burning Ethan in daylight.
This final act throws up all kinds of problems. For example, why didn’t the warrior women who surround the First Lady help Cherie earlier. But that’s a niggle compared to the choice to reduce misogyny to a demon. To focus it onto a single entity fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power. It gives the hatred of women a focal point, a single cause. Destroy the demon, kill Ethan, and women will no longer be victimised.
The thing is, misogyny isn’t one thing, it’s a system. It’s in the way people think, how we live. It’s the institutions that structure our lives. It’s in the language. It is the language. It is everything. The sum total of all culture. It cannot be usurped, got rid of, simply by ridding the world of one thing. The structures that create it still remain. All that happens when the women of Run Sweetheart Run kill the demon misogyny is a like for like swap with its binary, misogyny gets replaced with misandry. Some might say it’s about time, but that misses the point. The same organising principle that subjugates women controls us all. Changing the polarisation doesn’t change the need for misery in the system, only who is miserable.
In the end Run Sweetheart Run feels simplistic, which isn’t a surprise. These days people want simple answers to complicated questions. But simple answers offer no insights or solutions. It’s just more of the system it wants to kill.
Darrin // Nightingale 