For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel shows her hand when a character says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the madness we’re about to witness “happened so long ago.”
The movie is set in summer 2020.
Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender massage therapist in New York, and the first of the film’s two narrators. Her opinion of white gay male privilege, especially that of her best friend Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, can be stinging.
“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown in 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 safety protocols. Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan fashion model, is ensconced at the garden level. The 19-year-old Bahlul is the son of Terry’s estranged sister who converted to Islam. He has a broken leg, soft brown eyes and a small notebook. Is it a memoir? A novel? As he writes, he ruminates on his mother in a voice-over. We find out that Karla’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), wrote a minor-hit novel with material filched from Karla’s life. Here, fact, fiction and authentic experience are all themes to be mined.
Beyond skewering white gay male culture, the movie is also a dig at the pieties of the recently politicized. Terry, Karla and Vanessa don’t know where Morocco is, or Yemen or Kabul, for that matter. And Ronald, a food delivery guy (Faheem Ali), plays a telling role in exposing the hierarchy of lives that matter.
If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which recently closed the New Directors/New Films festival — captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.
Stress Positions
Not Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
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