This review is part of our coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It has been reissued for theatrical release in New York.
The tone: It's the summer of 2020 and Terry Goon (John Early) is simply trying to do the best he can. He is a depressed, disheveled, gay man from Brooklyn who succumbs to the most painful stages of the death of a young boy. His sugar daddy's husband (bob's burgers's John Roberts) has eloped with an African model, the party house he lives in is falling apart and he has to take care of his 19-year-old nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a bedridden Moroccan model with an injury. in the leg. the one that all of Terry's gay friends think he's sleeping with. To add a cherry on top of this shit sundae, Terry's issues come amid the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when everyone was paranoid, alone, and waving an active can of Lysol at anything within reach. .
But the presence of Bahlul and the intervention of his loyal but deeply disordered friend Karla (writer and director Theda Hammel) and the strange, mute upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Right), add fuel to the fire for the deterioration of the Terry's mental state. He adds a cute GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali) and Karla's culturally vulture girlfriend (Amy Zimmer), and you have an emotional hot spot that no vaccine can cure.
Bully Cave: While a large number of coastal comedies have been released in recent years as a direct consequence of COVID-19 medical and artistic restrictions (7 days, the bubble, how it ends), Stress positions It's the first of them that feels like a true period piece. Making judicious use of the limits of his microbudget, Hammel focuses on the mania and paranoia we felt in that horrible year: uncertainty about what measures really kept us safe; monitor our and others' levels of caution; gleaning virtue from our isolation, even when it killed our souls.
Much of that sentiment is embodied in Early's manic portrayal of Terry Goon, a role that goes straight to the barrel of his trademark malicious comedy and an apparent attempt to break out of those labels. Terry is a loser, a man clearly incapable of taking care of himself, stuck in crippling anxiety about every aspect of his existence. Every phone call or doorbell is an active injury to your existence, whether it's another one of your nosy friends trying to catch a glimpse of the handsome youngster you're taking in or the begrudging obligation to bang pots and pans at the appointed time to support the factory workers. health.
Let's compare this to Bahlul, the least stressed character in Stress positions – where Terry worries about everything, Bahlul reflects honestly and healthily on his upbringing with a strict white Muslim mother. He responds with curiosity and joy to Karla's presentation as a trans woman, enjoying playing with gender himself. (“Not everyone is trans!” Terry yells at Karla after several attempts to push Bahlul toward transition). It's a delightfully focused performance in a film overshadowed by wild characters and relentless absurdity.
Hello to my reflection: Speaking of Karla, she feels that Stress positions' true protagonist, even as the film moves from Terry to Bahlul and moves on to a variety of themes throughout its dreamlike ninety minutes. Conflicting and competing voiceovers overlap the film's more meditative stretches, each coming from unreliable narrators: an understanding of the ways in which the lockdowns of 2020 often forced us to look inward, at our past, and ask ourselves if this could be a turning point for what is really important.
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