After just one minute it is clear that Ani, the main character in Luckiest Girl Alive – the Netflix film that was recommended to me quite forcefully by the streamer in recent weeks – carries issues with it. As she buys knives with her fiancé Luke, she envisions them dripping with blood. In a pizza restaurant, she doesn’t eat a bite with Luke at the table; while he is going to the toilet is stuffing himself. She is obsessed with the high class of her in-laws, has a day job hiding her own background as a former scholarship student.
There’s a lot going wrong Luckiest Girl Alive. Especially towards the end, full of deus-ex-machina plot twists that are so characteristic of Netflix productions, and where there always seems to be a producer who is hammering on a feel-good ending. What the film does do well is show how difficult it is to speak constructively about transgressive behaviour. Also, or rather: especially within elitist circles that pride themselves on open-mindedness.
As a teenager, Ani goes on a scholarship to an expensive private school where she is surrounded by rich children who are extremely interested in her. The chubby Ani is flattered and gets drunk at their party. Then the boys turn out to be especially interested because they can rape Ani with impunity, unlike rich poop girls.
‘Do you know what rape is?’, one of the boys asks when she says crying the next day that his friends have crossed her line. Her mother urges Ani not to share anything about the fateful evening – people will look down on her. Years later, when Luke reads an article by Ani about the rape, he says, “I thought you were over this. I thought you were strong.’
Strong women don’t complain: Ani shows what this idea does to women. She’s tough, she definitely doesn’t want to be a victim, she wants to be cool, successful, thin, thinner, thinnest, without complaining about hunger. Ani depicts the woman who keeps her mouth shut after an inappropriate text message or a hand on a buttock. The woman who does not want to degrade herself to someone else’s subject.
The end of the film – Ani does not marry Luke and publishes in the newspaper about her rape – is heroic, but not very realistic. It would be more truthful if Ani continued her silence, like countless other women who also experience transgressive behavior but don’t talk about it. Because they tell themselves that they can handle something like that. Because they don’t feel like the predictable reactions from their environment. Because they don’t feel like ‘I’ve known this guy for twenty years, he really doesn’t mean it that way, do you really want to make a point of this, that’s exactly what I thought too’.
Oppression disguised as emancipation. About that Luckiest Girl Alive being able to make a statement – if that Netflix producer hadn’t come in.