There’s More to Look at Than Learn in 100 Nights of Hero
The film faithfully translates the feminist commentary of Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel while deemphasizing its more complex narrative techniques.
Isabel Greenberg is deeply invested in alternate universes. She constructed “Early Earth,” the setting of two of her graphic novels, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth (2013) and The One Hundred Nights of Hero (2016). The former is a collection of creation myths for Early Earth, while the other is modeled on One Thousand and One Nights and its frame story of a woman delaying a man’s predation by distracting him with storytelling. The latter book has been adapted into a feature film, 100 Nights of Hero, which faithfully translates the book’s feminist commentary while disappointingly deemphasizing its more complex narrative techniques.
Greenberg sets her book in a region of Early Earth characterized by stifling gender-based oppression, a country where women are forbidden to read or write and can be executed on the whims of their husbands. Young noblewoman Cherry (played in the film by Maika Monroe) learns that her husband has wagered with his friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) that she can resist the latter’s seduction for 100 nights. To rebuff Manfred, who makes it clear that he won’t take “no” for an answer, Cherry’s maid and secret lover, Hero (Emma Corrin), employs the Scheherazade gambit, occupying him with stories each evening until he falls asleep.
As the book relates a variety of these stories, mixing folklore and myth, their connections to Hero’s past eventually become clear. The film has just one story within the larger one, a tale of three sisters (distractingly, one is played by Charli xcx) who cause a scandal when their literacy is revealed. Instead of an interwoven anthology, the movie cuts back and forth between the two threads. That simplification, likely employed to streamline the production, weakens Greenberg’s overarching investigation into how storytelling and coded meanings can subvert oppression. It is also just odd that the characters continually attest to how vital it is that women tell each other their own stories when none of those stories are actually accessible to the audience.
However, while her script lacks the book’s mythic bent, director and co-screenwriter (with Greenberg) Julia Jackman does evoke that quality in the film’s visual sensibility. Recalling films like Tarsem Singh’s 2006 adventure fantasy The Fall or the works of Wes Anderson, she incorporates the tropes of an illustrated storybook into the aesthetic, through the sumptuous set and costume design and by coaxing heightened, mannered performances from her actors. This is a film of rich and contrasting colors — Cherry’s white clothing pointedly emphasizing how she remains undefiled by the male touch, Manfred’s sinister all-black attire, the three sisters in idyllic greens and blues.
In some respects, the movie seems crafted specifically to be released as clips on social media sites — for better or worse, our contemporary mode of sharing folktales. It is most striking in moments that lend themselves to clips, like a jarringly violent scene of Manfred proudly holding up the carcass of a deer he’s slaughtered. Shots often put characters or actions dead center in the screen, accommodating the cropping needed to make widescreen imagery legible in portrait mode on social feeds. It remains to be seen whether the film will catch on like the stories within it in Early Earth. But I’d suggest starting by sharing the graphic novel.
100 Nights of Hero is now streaming.
