I don’t know anything about the P D James source material, but Chris Petit’s film of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman has a dark and unexpected take on its catchy title. As the detective doing the unsuitable job – engaged by a rich man to find out why his son hanged himself – Pippa Guard’s Cordelia Gray unearths clues and follows leads as capably as any man probably would, and has sufficient physical agility and determination to escape at her major moment of peril. But she embodies little of the classic authority of the investigating protagonist: she expresses herself untidily and allows herself to identify too much with the dead man (to the point of almost accidentally replicating his suicide), and she’s much more watched upon than she is the watcher – the fact that the dead man was found dressed as a woman contributes to the sense of destabilization. When she finds her way to the truth, it yields little sense of actual or figurative light – the denouement takes place in darkness and in near-silence, as the culmination of a long-standing familial fracture. The fracture isn’t just that though – it’s that of an England in which the stability of the grand houses and the bucolic cottages and the very proper accents is rotting from within, eaten away by avarice and evasion and hypocrisy (the solution to the mystery lies, literally, in the blood). Petit’s minimizing of narrative in favour of mood and intuition has elements both of diagnosis and potential cure - given the movie’s period, it’s hard not to think of Margaret Thatcher as the overwhelming national reference point for any assessment of unsuitability, and for considering how that assessment might or might not correlate with gender identity. Certainly Thatcher’s public persona was largely built on denying the intuitive, often - so to speak- un-Guarded openness that characterizes Gray here.
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