For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel exhibits her hand when a personality says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the insanity we’re about to witness “occurred so way back.”
The film is ready in summer time 2020.
Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender therapeutic massage therapist in New York, and the primary of the movie’s two narrators. Her opinion of white homosexual male privilege, particularly that of her greatest buddy Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, might be stinging.
“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown within the brownstone of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Leo (John Roberts). Upstairs, Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), a tenant, puffs cigarettes and vaguely hews to Terry’s Covid security protocols. Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan vogue mannequin, is ensconced on the backyard stage. The 19-year-old Bahlul is the son of Terry’s estranged sister who transformed to Islam. He has a damaged leg, smooth brown eyes and a small pocket book. Is it a memoir? A novel? As he writes, he ruminates on his mom in a voice-over. We discover out that Karla’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), wrote a minor-hit novel with materials filched from Karla’s life. Right here, reality, fiction and genuine expertise are all themes to be mined.
Past skewering white homosexual male tradition, the film can also be a dig on the pieties of the just lately politicized. Terry, Karla and Vanessa don’t know the place Morocco is, or Yemen or Kabul, for that matter. And Ronald, a meals supply man (Faheem Ali), performs a telling position in exposing the hierarchy of lives that matter.
If a few of the factors appear muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which just lately closed the New Administrators/New Movies competition — captures the customarily hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” second.
Stress PositionsNot Rated. Operating time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
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