{"id":434437,"date":"2025-09-18T20:42:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T20:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/434437\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T20:42:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T20:42:12","slug":"swiped-review-lily-james-leads-a-girlboss-social-network-that-is-half-film-half-bumble-advert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/434437\/","title":{"rendered":"Swiped review \u2013 Lily James leads a girlboss Social Network that is half film, half Bumble advert"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A brazen test of the line between film and feature-length commercial, Swiped frames as a feminist triumph: one woman\u2019s climb from marginalised tech worker to CEO of a dating app in Blackstone Inc\u2019s vast portfolio of assets. Just, you know… don\u2019t read anything under the \u201ccontroversies\u201d heading of Blackstone\u2019s Wikipedia page.<\/p>\n

For the most part, you can look at Rachel Lee Goldenberg\u2019s biopic of Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd<\/a> as a light, pleasant bit of empowerment. It\u2019s serious about the entrenched, hydra-headed misogyny of the tech industry and its depiction of Wolfe Herd\u2019s co-founding of Tinder \u2013 she resigned and, in 2014, filed a lawsuit against the company for sexual harassment (it was later settled out of court). Under the encouragement of Andrey Andreev, the co-founder of Russian dating app Badoo, she founded Bumble as an alternative dating app that placed control in women\u2019s hands by having them initiate the conversation.<\/p>\n

Wolfe Herd is played by Lily James with maximum luminosity. She\u2019s close to perfect, but \u2013 don\u2019t worry! \u2013 not totally perfect. In Goldenberg\u2019s script, co-written with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele, she\u2019s called out on her ignorance of her own white privilege by friend and co-worker Tisha (Industry\u2019s Myha\u2019la, who was able to explore all of this in much more depth<\/a> in, well, Industry). \u201cOnce you climbed up the ladder, you never reached back down,\u201d she argues. Did it make her feel special, in fact, to be the only woman in the room?<\/p>\n

Yet the film can\u2019t get Tisha to even say the word \u201cprivilege\u201d \u2013 she stumbles over the precursor \u201cinherent\u201d a couple of times and then gives up \u2013 and then treats what could be a compelling chink in our hero\u2019s armour as something to namecheck and solve immediately with an apology and a hug.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a deliberate unseriousness to Swiped, from Dan Stevens\u2019s vaguely absurd Russian accent and indie boy fringe as Andreev (and these days you don\u2019t cast Stevens in a role unless you want him to get a little silly with it<\/a>), to the depiction of 2010s culture as all playground slides in the office and black tights with sneakers. It\u2019s a film where obscene amounts of money are being made in a Zooey Deschanel-coded wonderland.<\/p>\n

\"LilyLily James as Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in \u2018Swiped\u2019 (Disney\/Hulu)<\/p>\n

We\u2019re certainly meant to take Wolfe Herd\u2019s experiences seriously. At the same time, Swiped wants her story to sit at the very border of feminist fairytale, because there it can get away with a blatant PR montage that exists only to list Bumble\u2019s progressive credentials: we move from the phrase \u201cthe safest place on the internet for women\u201d to the phrase \u201cBIPOC women founders\u201d, spoken essentially without context; then we move to a courtroom to briefly depict Wolfe Herd and Bumble\u2019s involvement in anti-cyberflashing legislation.<\/p>\n

These are all materially good things for a company to do. But that\u2019s the problem \u2013 Swiped is far more interested in convincing us that Bumble\u2019s earned its feminist credentials than in exploring what being a \u201cfeminist company\u201d actually means when there are billions of dollars on the table. And that feeds directly into the criticisms that the company has faced over the years. Teen Vogue\u2019s executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, for example, once termed the app \u201cthe girlboss-ification of dating\u201d. Swiped, then, might be called \u201cthe girlboss-ification of biopics\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dir: Rachel Lee Goldenberg. Starring: Lily James, Dan Stevens, Myha\u2019la, Jackson White, Ben Schnetzer, Pierson Fod\u00e9, Clea DuVall. 16+, 110 minutes<\/p>\n

\u2018Swiped\u2019 streams on Disney+ from 19 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-434437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115227246459502777","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}