Stress Positions
There are some who will say, “So what?” No offense, but even Roger Ebert would find the indie feature “Stress Positions,” which happens to be the debut feature of writer-director and actress, Theda Hammel, unlikable. It doesn’t seem to care whether its audiences like it or not. For one, it tries to time travel us back to 2019, when the covid-19 pandemic first started. And many audiences especially in a comedy are most likely to not get entertained. It also features some of the worst portrayals of actors, who are without a doubt the most self absorbed people I have ever seen. This is an unpleasant approach, no doubt, but each to his own. Those who possess a strong feeling of admiration for Ms. Mannon’s assertiveness will find her decisions quite the opposite. However, viewers do not lead such an active lifestyle and many of them will leave the theater.
Taking place during the spring and summer of 2020, the film follows Terry (John Early) who struggles to cope with his boyfriend Leo’s (John Roberts) decision to move in with Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) who is a 19 year old Moroccan fashion model with a broken leg. Leo’s brownstone is structurally reinforced to the extent of its imperviousness towards intruders. As an act of self-defense that later proves to be irrational, Terry attempts to cover every inch of the place with Lysol, and scrub off the antique remnants brought by Leo who frequently hosted parties. In his madness, Terry becomes a recluse who seeks to keep every stranger away from the apartment along with its inhabitants.
Terry’s having a good-looking, youthful but illusive male model hid in the four corners of his apartment, and no doubt it will light a few eyebrows among Terry’s associates. Before long, his best (and perhaps the only?) friend, working trans lesbian, Karla (Hammel) appears on the scene to examine the new man in the house and to escape her wife Vanessa, the fledgling writer who has used up the first installment of Karla’s life and still remains unable to produce a second one. Much to Ward’s annoyance and discomfort, paranoia builds up around him, and yes, he gets hurt after slipping on raw chicken. Bahlul is about to understand who he is, thanks to Karla, who does her utmost to win him over as a friend. Since they have been preoccupied with other projects, their routines become excessively challenging. Penny Leo comes in with her new fiancé among other people who are intent on having a look at the new man.
The early going has its humorous moments since Hammel begins on a comically silly note. It is amusing how Terry is so adamant on banging his pots and pans in support for health care workers on the frontline no matter how much he continues with his rant. What also caught my attention is how the people who are rather close to Terry’s space tease Bahlul to win his favour but only expose their narrow and sometimes even racist views. Karla, for instance, resorts to flaunting her questionable Mediterranean origin, Vanessa complains about her traumatic experience of having to withstand the reality of “blonde” women. Everyone seems so ready to describe how terrible and oppressive American everything is, especially in Terry’s case, presumably to explain his short period of post September 11 conservatism, but none of them even seem to know whether Morocco is in the Middle East or not.
The movie was funny for a certain amount of time, but the biggest flaw of “Stress Positions” is that the certain amount of time is not even the halfway mark. The remaining run time of the film is first stretched thin by too many plots, too many characters and too many times the same jokes have been made throughout the film, nearly making Hammel to turn the whole saga into a failed attempt on Blake Edwards styled farce.
Yet another problem stands as the unavoidability that almost all the characters in the film are somehow more narcissistic and generally nasty than the rest, and without being entertaining. The only one who remains unaffected by this is Bahlul; the funniest subtly running joke in my opinion is Bahluls response. It is in this way that all these people clamoring for his attention imagine that they are someone very important and interesting, when in fact they are not. It is difficult to see how the film would be worst than an endless catalog of self satisfied loathsome when it equally never attempted this and instead focused on the manic events that were around and being portrayed.
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