ALMA MATER

"After the Hunt."

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

Julia Roberts stars as a Yale philosophy professor in Luca Guadagnino's film.

If there is a truth that holds firm beneath the wickedly slippery surfaces of Luca Guadagnino's movies, it's that presentation counts. No sartorial decision is made lightly, and no design element is arrived at by accident. The opening titles of his new drama, "After the Hunt," should have you on high alert. They're elegantly rendered in what looks to be Windsor Light Condensed, widely recognizable as Woody Allen's onscreen typeface of choice. A Thad Jones jazz standard on the soundtrack more or less confirms that we're watching a borderline trollish act of homage. Are we about to enter an enclave of attractive, privileged, hopelessly self-involved intellectuals, as in so many Allen movies? Or will Guadagnino's art imitate Allen's life, with a tale of grim allegations, firm denials, and he-said-she-said dialectics?

Yes, to all of the above. "After the Hunt" revolves around Alma Imhoff, a professor in the philosophy department at Yale, where the talk is neither light nor condensed. She is played by Julia Roberts, who, you may recall, was a nineteen-fifties art-history instructor in "Mona Lisa Smile" (2003), pushing conservative-minded Wellesley women toward self-realization. Alma, a creature of our times, offers a pricklier kind of feminist inspiration: she's formidable, aloof, feared, and adored. I counted one unguarded outburst of laughter, when Alma, unwinding over drinks with a colleague, lets out the signature full-throated Roberts cackle, but it felt like a boozy anomaly—a stray glimmer of warmth from a woman who knows that scholarly authority is best served cold. Striding into a classroom, she has only to utter the words "Foucault's panopticon" to reduce us all to teacher's pets, eagerly leaning forward in our seats.