Cease us if you’ve read this one right before: An alcoholic trans bodywork therapist, a homosexual around divorcé in agonizing again soreness, and a 50 percent-Moroccan 19-12 months-previous male model in a leg cast walk into a party home. That’s the setup for this clip from Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, Stress Positions. In this scene completely shared with Vulture, Hammel’s character, Karla, is browsing her mate Terry Goon (a correctly bedraggled John Early) and his nephew and houseguest, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), at the peak of summer season 2020’s pandemic lockdowns.
Much of the movie’s comedy is kinetic and actual physical, a farce whole of going areas established on just about every floor of the dilapidated brownstone: poppers gasoline masks repurposed for COVID protection, an obnoxious doorbell that keeps summoning Terry to limp-waddle to and fro, a couple of deeply consequential pratfalls, and a Chekhov’s Theragun. The relaxation of the humor is talky, a cruel boardwalk caricature of the ways self-concerned queer Brooklyn millennials vacillate amongst 50 percent-baked social justice and delicate edgelord-ism. The movie takes advantage of lockdown — the actual physical and mental isolation of it — as an exacerbating power on these already present anti-social and oblivious tendencies, like a magnifying glass schooling a sunbeam on some gay ants.
This scene is one of the talky ones, illustrating that wonderful on the net generational divide: remembering 9/11. Specially, recounting to Bahlul how previous “anti-theist” Terry made use of to tell Karla in college or university that she appeared like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Terry’s defense? “You did,” and “I didn’t know you had been a girl.” True elegant, Terry Goon. Anxiety Positions premieres in New York this Friday and will be launched by Neon nationwide on April 26.
