Bottoms
Director Emma Seligman follows up her feature debut “Shiva Baby” with a raucous comedy like no other. “Bottoms” is about two best friends, lesbian duo PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who inadvertently stumble upon a plan that could make them popular at their high school and help them win over the people they love: tall dreamboat Brittany (Kaia Gerber) for PJ, and short hottie Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) for Josie. Adding insult to injury, Isabel is in a toxic relationship with the school’s beefy quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), whose possessive right hand man Tim (Miles Fowler) becomes an unexpected enemy to Josie. By chance, PJ and Josie team up with another outcast classmate, Hazel (Ruby Cruz), and Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), a teacher going through his own personal crisis, to start a fight club/self-defense class with zero qualifications or ability to protect themselves from another school but ultimately themselves.
Written by Seligman and Sennott, “Bottoms” is chaotic fun silly. They’ve created a world where over the top high school drama doesn’t always have to make sense and it’s better that way. Cinematographer Maria Rusche makes the school look dreary in blue, an oppressive space that could eat anyone below top of the food chain student alive. The teacher makes only declarative statements, no explanation, then lets students go back to whatever kids want to do while he reads magazines inappropriate for minors and stews about his divorce.
In one early classroom scene there’s a student shown in a cage but not mentioned, later we learn he’s the school’s top wrestler who can presumably only come out for matches, football players wear their uniforms all the time for some reason. PJ cites feminism as a reason to start their fight club/self-defense group, but Josie points out that she actually hates feminism. The best friends go along with a rumor that they spent the summer in juvie, with Josie spinning gruesome survival tales to their classmates’ horror.
The movie is chock full of needle drops, including a hilarious use of karaoke standard Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and extra modern beats provided by Leo Birenberg and Charli XCX (among others). It’s one laugh out loud moment after another, like candies rolling off a conveyor belt.
There is one poignant scene where “Bottoms” drops its unserious tone for a vulnerable moment between PJ, Josie, Hazel and their club members. Gathered on the basketball court per Hazel’s suggestion that they should get to know their members better, the group starts sharing stories about traumatizing assaults, stalkers and frustrations over police inaction but it doesn’t last long before Josie jumps back into detailing her “time” in juvie. Still, it’s an effective acknowledgement of the very real violence girls their characters’ age face before returning to slapdash fisticuffs training.
“Bottoms” makes fun of high school movies: those where all the actors look like they’re in their thirties (because chances are good they are), and there’s supposed to be some coming of age lesson learned by soon to be grown ups. PJ and Josie do learn something valuable but only through bruised faces, bloody noses and more cuts/scrapes than one might think fair for two such young women simply trying to put on lipstick in peace.
“Bottoms” completely disrupts John Hughes movies and hands control over to the girls not as passive-aggressive plants or melancholy outsiders who only find happiness when they change themselves but as actual weirdos, nerds even. They are allowed to fall on their faces, be rude, make dirty jokes, bleed out. Seligman and Sennott are both so committed to the bit that there’s even a blooper reel in the closing credits.
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