BEFORE: Well, if the first part of this week was all about complex, many-charactered, split-timeline or interweaving stories, the second half of week is being turned over to Mark Duplass, he'll be here for the next three films. And there will be lesbians, but we don't discriminate here at the Movie Year, love is love is love. And romance is romance is romance.
Laia Costa carries over from "Life Itself". Annette Bening will be back in just a few days...
THE PLOT: Two women, who are dissatisfied with the dishonesty they see in dating and relationships, decide to make a pact to spend 24 hours together hoping to find a new way to create intimacy.
AFTER: Here's what I don't quite get about gay people, and this comes from being around during the 1980's and 90's, a terrible time due to the AIDS crisis, which was the big U.S. pandemic before the one we're going through now, and if there was one silver lining to that terrible dark cloud, it was that more gay people came out publicly, and while there's still discrimination lingering, more people are out and proud these days than there were before. For centuries gay people kept their private lives private, most of them anyway, and while this was probably for the sake of their own protection, it became the normal way to live a gay life, mostly in secret. But the post-1980's was almost like a second sexual revolution, where it became (eventually) OK to be gay, or bi, and then this broke the barriers eventually leading to it being OK to be trans, or whatever the "I" and "A" stand for in "LGBTQIA". (I'll look it up later, I promise.)
But then something else happened, along the way there was a fight for marriage equality, which through some nifty legal work became the law of the land in all 50 states, and it almost feels to me like gay people settled for the right to have the lives that the straights have. They had all this freedom, and it seemed like the sky was the limit, that they didn't have to live by the old rules of society, and then collectively it almost feels like the gay movement said, "Nah, we're OK with the old rules like marriage, because then we get spousal benefits like shared health insurance, co-owning property and the rights to adopt kids and co-parent them." I think there was an opportunity there to really re-write the rulebook, go above and beyond the old ways of thinking and create something new - and I wonder how many gay people are aware of the potential of this missed opportunity. Why have gay marriage be just like regular marriage in most respects, when it could have been something better, maybe higher or more noble? It seems a bit like starting up a new colony of humans on the moon and then opening up a McDonald's there. Do you really just want to settle for that, after such a momentous struggle and achievement?
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Gay marriage rights means more gay divorces, it's only fair. But it also didn't solve the lingering problems of how people meet and come together, how they form partnership bonds that last - that's a universal problem, gay or straight or "QIA". This film shows a unique method of getting around that problem, even though it reminds be a bit of Charlyne Yi in "Paper Heart", who claimed she'd never been in love, and Josh Radnor's character in "Happythankyoumoreplease", who invites a woman he barely knows to live with him for three days, to see if they're compatible. Naima meets Sergio after she sees her perform in a club, and they devise a plan to spend 24 hours together, having sex every hour. Since Naima is an actress who's just been fired from the latest Duplass Brothers film, she's suddenly got the time - and she claims she's never really been "in love", so this starts as a sort of social experiment.
(Let me back up a bit and go back to my theories for just a second - for many decades, even though people were aware of gay and lesbian relationships, the working theory among the straights was that gay people were somehow unable to form lasting relationship bonds, and that they all preferred quick, easy and shallow short-term sexual encounters. Which we all know now is blatantly untrue, as I think most blanket statements about large groups of people usually are. However, I suspect that some gay people either bought into this absurd line of reasoning, or took no steps to correct it, because why waste time correcting all the wrong people, especially when this belief gave them the perfect excuse to sleep around and not commit? A permanent party-based lifestyle, based on a misconception about what it meant to be gay, it may have been wrong but it was probably a lot of fun while it lasted. Meanwhile, without being bogged down with the time-drain of marriage and raising children, many gay people were able to devote more time to their careers or social networks, and probably advanced themselves quite well.)
So Naima and Sergio conduct their little social experiment - extending what is essentially their second date to a 24-hour marathon of getting to know each other, getting freaky with it, and perhaps learning more about themselves along the way. How much time is too much time, when the relationship is that new? And can we treat this 2018 film as a possible precursor to the pandemic? At the start of the COVID-19 there might have been some people forced to make quick decisions about who they would let into their bubble, or if they wanted to quickly make a change in their roommate or relationship status, when it looked like we might all be sequestered with the same people for weeks, or possibly months. (Side question - how many people made the wrong decision there, or found out that their marriage or other relationship just couldn't handle spending so much time together?).
The real mistake that these two girls make here, in my opinion, is that once you regulate sex, you kind of kill it. Sex is spontaneous at its best - when you say, "Hey, every alternate Thursday, 10 pm, let's get it on..." or in this case, it's on the hour for 24 hours, you've immediately put too much pressure on it. And you've turned it from a fun thing into a chore, so that's just not going to work - the first time one of them doesn't feel into it just because the clock strikes twelve, there are going to be some questions and issues - and that's what happens here, more or less.
The running joke among straight men sometimes is that it might be great to be gay, you can talk with your buddy about football, share a beer, get it on together, then just roll over and go to sleep. I haven't got the heart to inform those people that this is probably not how it works between gay men, but then, what do I know? Maybe for some of them this is exactly how it is. But the reverse codicil to this is therefore - how's it going to work between two women? Aren't they both going to want to talk about their feelings, gossip and then play those little passive-aggressive mind games with each other? I realize I'm also stereotyping here, but who's to say that some stereotypes aren't true? Besides, that's also what happens here, somehow the lack of sleep, the overabundance of sex and, well, let's call it petty jealousy (but that's perhaps an over-simplification) get in the way, and eventually the relationship here turns contentious, and the grand social experiment is over.
Maybe you could say these women got too close together, too quickly. There's a reason why you're supposed to wait a week before your second date, you know. And not call every day, not at the start of things - you've got to ease into these things gradually, generally speaking, like you're getting used to the temperature of the pool. But there will always be some people who think it's better to just dive right in and get it over with - I think that's just too much of a shock to the system. Now I want to know how many people have died in pools from jumping in suddenly, I bet it's a lot.
And don't ask me to explain what "Duck Butter" means - it sounds like an ingredient that some chef-testant would make on "Chopped" or "Top Chef", right? When I was a kid there was a novelty song called "Duck Butter", and that implied a reference to some kind of magical edible substance hidden inside a duck's body, like the tamale (or tomalley) of a lobster, and some people seek that out, while most avoid it. But here in this film it's neither of those things, it's fairly vulgar so I won't get into it, but you can look it up in the "urban dictionary" online. The meaning there implies it's something to do with male gay sex, here they just transposed that over to women. I know, we're not supposed to be ashamed of our bodies any more, nor any of the substances that are in them, but still, ewww.
Also starring Alia Shawkat (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Mae Whitman (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe"), Hong Chau (last seen in "Downsizing"), Kate Berlant (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Lindsay Burdge (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Kumail Nanjiani (last seen in "Stuber"), Mark Duplass (last seen in "Bombshell"), Jay Duplass (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Jenny O'Hara (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Carlos A. Salazar, Mel Eslyn, Armando Ballestros, Andrea Byrd, Elizabeth Hangan, Yelena Koshelevskaya, Jibz Cameron, Kyle Field (last seen in "The Overnight"), Stacey Koff, Margie Gilmore, Angelina Llongueras and the voice of Marc Maron (last seen in "Spenser Confidential").
RATING: 4 out of 10 hollow onion rings on set
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