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No one could accuse writer and director Julia Jackman of lack of ambition. Her second feature, shot with the visual flair and deadpan drollery of Wes Anderson or Yorgos Lanthimos, is based on a\u00a0graphic novel that reinterprets the One Thousand and One Nights as a\u00a0queer fairy tale about a\u00a0kingdom that suppresses women\u2019s education in service of a\u00a0cruel, birdlike deity, narrated by a\u00a0personification of a\u00a0violet moon\u2026and it stars Charli XCX<\/span>. As much as it sounds like a\u00a0hotchpotch of clashing ideas and influences, in just 90<\/span>\u00a0minutes Jackman miraculously manages to weave these disparate threads together into an imaginative, funny and genuinely affecting fable of queer female liberation.<\/span><\/p>\n After just a\u00a0touch of table-setting featuring a\u00a0Richard E. Grant cameo as the god known as Birdman, we\u2019re flung into an unnamed kingdom where women are forbidden from reading or writing. It rather resembles an Elizabethan acid trip, all dark wood panelling, ruffs, pearls and puff sleeves lit by psychedelic shafts of purple light. Think\u00a0<\/span>The Favourite<\/i> or the early sections of\u00a0<\/span>Orlando<\/i> but set to a\u00a0twinkly synth\u00a0score.<\/span><\/p>\n Noblewoman Cherry (Maika Monroe) must bear an heir or else she will be sentenced to hang by the Beak Brothers, a\u00a0religious order that makes the Spanish Inquisition look positively cuddly. But her husband Jerome (Amir El-Masry) won\u2019t consummate their marriage, and her devoted, enigmatic maidservant Hero (a pixie-like Emma Corrin) is her only companion.<\/span><\/p>\n Unbeknownst to either, Jerome and the roguish lord Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) wager that in Jerome\u2019s absence, Manfred will be able to seduce the sexually frustrated Cherry within one hundred nights. Galitzine is a\u00a0treat here as this deliciously devious but not too bright interloper, giving a\u00a0broader, even sillier version of his performance as a\u00a0Jacobean social-climber in last year\u2019s HBO<\/span> series\u00a0<\/span>Mary and George<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Corrin and Monroe, who have great chemistry, wisely play it more straight (<\/span>ahem<\/span><\/i>) than Galitzine. Their erotically charged chess game begins; a\u00a0secret signal between them has Hero thwart Manfred\u2019s amorous advances by regaling them with a\u00a0folk tale on each of those one hundred nights. This tale comes to life with lush, Pre-Raphaelite-esque visuals, as pop It Girl Charli XCX<\/span> plays one of three sisters who resist patriarchal subjugation with their secret literacy. But should Cherry give in to the sin of her own pleasure by sleeping with Manfred, thereby securing an heir and saving her own life? Or will she be executed regardless because of her betrayal? It\u2019s quite the predicament.<\/span><\/p>\n As long-winded and knotty as all of this sounds, the story unfolds at breakneck speed, with never a\u00a0dull moment. Jackman deftly interweaves her multiple narrative threads and indulges (complimentary) in woozy, dreamlike montages of image and sound, as if the story of Cherry and Hero is part of a\u00a0long lineage of tales of rebellious women echoing through the generations. She nails the tricky tonal balance of sincerity and humour, of intimacy and epic fantasy, culminating in a\u00a0sweet but never saccharine alternative kind of happily ever\u00a0after.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n