That was painfully obvious when I found myself watching the National Theatre’s screening of Jodie Comer’s much-acclaimed London performance in Prima Facie. Comer is riveting and the play most compelling but the rape that is at the heart of the play is not only utterly illogical but also anatomically impossible.

First let’s consider the motive for the crime, the reason the rape takes place.

INTIMATE

Jodie Comer plays Tess, a successful barrister who happily gets involved with her colleague Damien. Then comes the night in question. Dinner at the local Japanese place. Plenty of saké, followed by wine. Home to her place. Intimate talk, kissing, “it’s hot and sexy … we seem to fall into having sex,” she says.

Then later in bed, more kissing, cuddling. But suddenly, presumably due to all that alcohol, she has an overwhelming desire to vomit. Makes it to the loo. He’s kind, holds her hair back while she vomits and then carefully carries her back to bed.

Then, he rapes her. Go figure. Why on earth would he? He’s just had loving sex with her, he’s apparently enjoying their lusty new relationship.

But according to feminist lawyer turned playwright, Suzie Miller, that is just what men do.

Patriarchal bullies get their kicks out of asserting their power over vomit splattered women.

Then there’s the vital question of how it happens.

During Act II which features Tess’s cross-examination, she describes how she was pinned down. Using one of his hands Damo grips both her hands “pulled high above my head”, whilst his other hand is over her mouth, so she can’t cry out. “He was squashing me,” she says, which presumably means lying flat on top of her.

Having started my career as a sex therapist, I would suggest that it’s mighty difficult to sexually assault a resistant woman in precisely that position.

Recently I found myself discussing all this with a group at dinner and we ended up with guests on the floor trying to work out if the Prima Facie rape scenario was physically achievable – with hilarious results.

RAPT

But no doubt I was the only one in that rapt movie audience remotely concerned about whether this rape was possible.

One of my favourite movie performances is Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, where he plays a fading movie star stuck filming in a Japanese hotel who befriends a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson portraying an equally lost soul.

He’s in a troubled marriage, she clearly has the hots for him, yet he resists temptation, valuing their growing friendship. It’s a complex, touching story celebrating male restraint and kindness.

That was in 2003, before the rot really set in.

Over the next couple of decades, men were pushed ruthlessly from their pedestals. By 2020, Sophia Coppola, the producer of Lost in Translation, again called upon the talented Bill Murray, this time for her comedy On The Rocks, where he portrays a philandering father whose daughter fears her husband is having an affair.

In this supposedly jolly romp dad drags his daughter around town spying on the husband, indulging her paranoia with crass comments about “that’s the way men are”.

No moral complexity here – just degrading stereotypes about men who can’t keep their trousers zipped.

Yawn!

Many commentators have picked up on the male heroes’ fall from grace in the movies. There’s a funny rant by Scottish YouTuber, Critical Drinker. It’s called Why modern movies suck – they’re destroying our heroes.

SELFISH

He’s acerbic about the latest Star Wars sequel and talks about Hans Solo whom he points out “started out as a selfish smuggler who only cared about Number 1 but over the first three movies transformed into a smart, resourceful, brave fighter and protector for Princess Leia, ready to risk everything for the sake of his friends. Pretty cool, right?”

The YouTuber then describes the sequel set thirty years later, where Solo is “a cynical, self-absorbed smuggler who’s lost track of his own shit, a dead-beat dad who’s abandoned his wife and son and an incompetent criminal who’s made enemies across the galaxy”.

Solo is supposed to be in his 60s yet he is “somehow less experienced, competent and mature than when we first met him. All his experiences, his character development and achievements have been rendered completely moot”.

A fitting epitaph, perhaps, to the fate of generations of once competent men in this feminist world?

What bugs me is even when movies try to portray admirable, sensitive male characters, they still can’t get them right.

I recently enjoyed Emma Thompson’s performance in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Thompson plays Nancy, an uptight widow who, having never experienced an orgasm, decides to find someone who can show her what she was missing. She lucks out with gorgeous Leo, a sex worker of rare charm and sensitivity.

It’s a clever production, as Leo gradually coaxes the tense, brittle Nancy through her insecurities. Yet one scene grated.