Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: An alcoholic trans bodywork therapist, a gay near divorcé in agonizing back pain, and a half-Moroccan 19-year-old male model in a leg cast walk into a party house. That’s the setup for this clip from Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, Stress Positions. In this scene exclusively shared with Vulture, Hammel’s character, Karla, is visiting her friend Terry Goon (a perfectly bedraggled John Early) and his nephew and houseguest, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), at the height of summer 2020’s pandemic lockdowns.
Much of the movie’s comedy is kinetic and physical, a farce full of moving parts set on every floor of the dilapidated brownstone: poppers gas masks repurposed for COVID safety, 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 rest of the humor is talky, a merciless boardwalk caricature of the ways self-involved queer Brooklyn millennials vacillate between half-baked social justice and mild edgelord-ism. The film uses lockdown — the physical and mental isolation of it — as an exacerbating force on those already existing anti-social and oblivious tendencies, like a magnifying glass training a sunbeam on some gay ants.
This scene is one of the talky ones, illustrating that great online generational divide: remembering 9/11. Specifically, recounting to Bahlul how former “anti-theist” Terry used to tell Karla in college that she looked like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Terry’s defense? “You did,” and “I didn’t know you were a woman.” Real classy, Terry Goon. Stress Positions premieres in New York this Friday and will be released by Neon nationwide on April 26.
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Rebecca Alter , 2024-04-18 16:00:40
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