Review: Fiction is Freedom – Just Lie!
Theda Hammel’s COVID fever dream ‘Stress Positions’ is medicinally funny
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰
Romance: ✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰✰
I was supposed to review Cuckoo this week, but fell prey to the summer surge of COVID and couldn't go in person to see it at the movies. I figured, what better to cover instead than a movie that takes us back to that first impressively miserable pandemic summer?
Minimal spoilers ahead!
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
Do you ever catch yourself remembering the first few months of lockdown and have a flash of one of those paranoid rituals that were, for a time, a part of our everyday life? I’m not talking about masking, or social distancing—I mean wiping your groceries down before putting them away or panicking because you touched your own face in public. These practices were born out of necessity, and in a very uncertain time, they made us feel safe. But they also made us feel…insane. Stress Positions clearly pulls inspiration from this, as it and everyone in it is also insane.
Stress Positions follows Terry Goon (John Early), a very stressed out, soon-to-be-ex husband of a wealthy real estate gay, living in Brooklyn during the early days of Summer 2020. He routinely avoids signing the divorce papers from his soon-to-be-ex husband’s spare Brownstone (it's the crappy one they only throw parties in) while being EXTREMELY, PAINFULLY, diligently vigilant about COVID. His only problem? Everyone else in his life has vigilance fatigue. And they would really prefer if he could just stop talking about masking and pods and exposures. Okay??
Every character in this movie is perfectly designed to satirize the modern Brooklynite; that is to say, each is uniquely awful, ignorant and annoying in their own way. Terry is in lockdown with his 19-year-old nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a half-Moroccan model with a broken leg and his own 19-year-old existential crisis. Terry must also contend with Coco, the mysterious woman who lives on the top floor and came with the place. Coco is a COVID denier and a bad influence on Bahlul, which stresses Terry out even more. In terms of his community outside the pod, he frequently takes stressed out phone calls on his Google Home with his best friend, a trans woman named Karla (played by writer/director Theda Hammel).
Karla moves through the world like the two-faced Queen Bee of your middle school clique. Logically, you recognize that she’s rude and inconsiderate and never listens to you—but she’s also captivating and you can’t stop following her around. Karla is quarantining in Greenpoint with her girlfriend, who she seems to hate. Terry is on his progressive high horse, proud to take COVID more seriously than of all his friends, until you find out that he hasn’t gone to a single BLM protest and discourages posting anti-patriotic things for fear of the NSA and “getting on watchlists”.
Despite how unlikeable they all should be, Hammel’s precise comedic lens makes each of these characters unreasonably funny. In reality, you’d hate to spend time with any of these people—but in Stress Positions, the minutes fly by. No element of performative wokeness is too small to make fun of. There is an ongoing bit where every white person in the movie can not for the life of them remember that Morocco is not in the Middle East. At one point, a frustrated, embarrassed Terry frantically searches on Youtube, what is the Middle East???. There is even a cute, Brown delivery guy named Ronald who regularly reappears in the film, and you root for him—until he starts fetishizing “trannies” (he really kinda likes them!). Every non-white person in the film is asked, “But where are you from from” at least twice.
The writing in Stress Positions is so clever; particularly in conversation with each other, these characters deliver endless quip after quip, skewering themselves and each other in an educated-sounding but-actually-dumb way. One of my favorite moments was Karla, referencing Terry’s wedding on Fire Island, calling the town “a beach retreat for the children of Sodom.” During one wine-drunk night, Karla becomes even more unapologetic than usual and begins spouting advice at Bahul on everything from his “potential” for transness to his writing. When he mentions that he is writing a book about his own life, she wrinkles her nose in disgust. When Bahul says he doesn’t know how to do anything else, Karla yells at him, “Fiction is freedom, Bahul. Lie! Just lie! Everyone else does it!” And she may have a point…
Karla is the primary narrator of the movie, but throughout its 90 minute runtime, Stress Positions is voiced over by many different people, each explaining the events of the movie through the lens of their subjective emotional perspective. The narrators are not neutral, they each take turns providing historical context to their fraught interpersonal relationships that inform why the events of the film unfold as they do. This contributes to the whole movie’s playfully disorienting energy, with memories and flashbacks shot slightly out of focus and at weird angles. They all feel like they could be mushroom-informed.
John Early is a master of physical comedy in general, and Stress Positions is no exception to this rule. Fans of Search Party may remember John Early’s character Elliot and the panic-induced rash he develops as his book deadline approaches. This movie felt like an expansion of that storyline. Terry is twitchy, tense, doubled over with herniated back pain, rigid with stressed out fury, slipping on a raw chicken cutlet he dropped on the floor. He’s just perfect.
The movie reaches a fever pitch when Terry attempts to hold a socially-distant Fourth of July BBQ in his backyard and Karla interferes just enough to let it get out of hand, including inviting Leo (Terry’s would-be ex husband), and Leo’s latest fiancée. There is a very vague, sinister energy that courses through the movie, giving you the faintest sense of unease that these characters might need to worry about something else other than getting drunk or laid in these COVID times. And you know what they say, if a Theragun appears in the first act…
You can rent Stress Positions on VOD. It will also be on Hulu August 21st!
This movie is chaotic as fuck and I loved it