Untouchable: the Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein review films like this change the world
September 5, 2019Whats it like to be cajoled, threatened and blackmailed by a sexual predator who has power, history and society on his side?
Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears. Of women struggling to articulate what they have left unsaid sometimes for decades, and what has gone unsaid by our sex en masse throughout history, until now.
You probably know the basic story by osmosis if nothing else so heavily was the media moguls eventual fall covered when the weight of evidence finally became too much for a man of even his resources to withstand.
MacFarlane tells the story well. She gives due recognition to the journalists, especially Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who broke the story in the New York Times, and Ronan Farrows gathering of 13 witness accounts in the New Yorker after painstaking investigations. But, like Dream Hamptons Surviving R Kelly, Untouchable prioritises the victims stories (regardless of their personal celebrity or lack thereof here names such as Rosanna Arquette simply slip in next to those without public profiles) and fills in the perpetrators to explain his relative power or position at the time. As with the R Kelly film thought to have been instrumental in the RnB stars latest arrest on federal sex trafficking charges a pattern of predatory behaviour emerges, painted stroke by painful stroke by those who found themselves first charmed and cajoled by one version of Weinstein, then confronted with a very different one behind closed doors.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us