CineWomen: Halina Reijn’s ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ isn’t your Gen X slasher flick
Plus Lena Dunham’s ‘Sharp Stick’ and ‘Tiny Furniture’ and Věra Chytilová’s ‘Daisies’
With my partner working on the other side of the country half or more of the year for the better part of the last decade, I’ve partaken in plenty of otherwise social activities by myself: Gone out to eat. Watched plays. Attended concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. (A woman seated nearby described me as “brave” for doing this.)
I continue to patronize the theater almost exclusively as a party of one, but this month I revisited my all-time favorite solo pastime and went to a movie alone.
Better yet, it was during a weekday. Ish. A 5:30 p.m. matinee on a Monday. I saw two other people at the historic cinema on the Westside of Los Angeles: the employee who sold me a ticket and small popcorn in one transaction, and one other ticket holder in the three hundred-seat auditorium.
I was done with work, but it still felt like playing hooky.
I don’t have any profound insight into what’s so special about this particular scenario. It has to do with both the timing and the venue and unplugging for a couple of hours when you’re usually very much plugged in. It feels indulgent. Sacred. A couple of hours of self-care that I very much recommend.
‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’
After the first body drops in director Halina Reijn’s Generation Z slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, the rich twentysomethings riding out a hurricane in one of their parent’s McMansions seek out the relative stranger in their midst: forty-year-old Greg (a handsome-as-ever Lee Pace), who earlier in the evening cried uncle over his new young girlfriend and her friends’ shenanigans and retired for the night. Gen X viewers might find themselves guilty of thinking, “Finally, an adult. He’ll straighten this all out.” But this isn’t a Gen X movie, and zoomers don’t need some mediocre middle-aged dude who spends his weekend partying with folks half his age to save them. Unfortunately, they’re also too catty, insecure and high to save themselves.
That Greg isn’t some Svengali who holds the young women in thrall is just one of the ways that the script by Sarah DeLappe (from a story by Kristen Roupenian, author of the infamous New Yorker story “Cat Person”) toys with expectations. Allegiances shift from scene to scene as viewers get to know the characters among whom no heroine emerges.
We enter the story with Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and her working-class girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova), whose arrival at the party house is met with less enthusiasm than one would expect from Sophie’s old friends. Meanwhile, host David (Pete Davidson) is awkwardly mean to his sweet girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders); Alice (Rachel Sennott) is blissfully un-self-aware about what a cliché she and her older boyfriend Greg are; and Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) is cold to a degree that suggests fresh history.
The group agrees to play the titular murder-mystery game, but when one of them actually dies, suspicion surfaces long-held grudges among friends whose whole lives have been put on for social media, including their fake affection for each other.
DeLappe’s slick script sets the stage for the specific circumstances that cause the situation to spin out of control — a storm, a power outage, a dead car battery — while hiding the mystery’s solution in plain sight, all the while skewering the characters’ privilege and weaponizing their politically correct language.
In her controlled English-language debut, Dutch filmmaker Reijn, a Gen Xer herself, uses genre to expose, not without affection, a generation steeped in youth, sex and power — or at least the appearance of it — and how that wreaks havoc on sincere, honest relationships.
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), directed by Halina Reijn (theaters)
‘Sharp Stick’
A dozen years after making her feature directorial debut with Tiny Furniture, writer-director Lena Dunham returns to the big screen with Sharp Stick, a sexual coming-of-ager centered on a twenty-six-year-old virgin. In the interim, Dunham, of course, created the iconic HBO series Girls, as well as Camping. It’s gratifying, then, that she’s stuck to the indie route for her follow-up film.
Like Tiny Furniture before it, Sharp Stick draws on Dunham’s personal experience — in this case, undergoing a hysterectomy at age thirty-one due to endometriosis. Here, her protagonist Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) had a radical hysterectomy at an even younger age — fifteen — shaping her experience and sense of self in her most formative years.
But in other ways, Sarah Jo is the opposite of the characters at the center of Dunham’s past projects. Whereas Dunham reveled in the self-involved privilege of her unlikable early characters, Sarah Jo is saccharine sweet and implausibly innocent, despite her medical history. A product of the revolving door of men her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) entertained throughout her childhood, and sister to a wannabe influencer (Taylour Paige) who experiences her own pregnancy scare, Sarah Jo somehow hasn’t figured out how a blowjob works.
She finds out when she comes on to Josh (Jon Bernthal), the stay-at-home dad of a boy with Down syndrome whom Sarah Jo cares for. Loving and fun, Josh comes off as a good guy despite his protestations that he’s a loser — and the fact that he’s cheating on his very pregnant wife (Dunham) — with intimacy so gentle and vulnerable that one starts to wonder whether this is his fantasy or hers.
The answer becomes clear when their affair is discovered in an explosively pathetic scene. Sarah Jo, though, blames herself and her inexperience, and sets out to methodically learn the literal ABCs of sex. As confounding as the character’s quirks are (some argue they’re coded to suggest Sarah Jo has autism), what follows is a sex-positive journey of self-discovery that’s a sweet as it is explicit.
Sharp Stick (2022), directed by Lena Dunham (theaters, digital)
‘Tiny Furniture’
There’s a certain demographic for whom Lena Dunham is, as her character Hannah Horvath declares in the pilot episode of HBO’s Girls, the “voice of a generation”: white privileged millennial women — a group she both celebrates and skewers in her feature debut Tiny Furniture as well as her signature TV show. A dozen years later, her clear-eyed portrait of herself and her friends and the women who relate to them is astute as ever, demonstrating a keen self-awareness at its most unflattering.
Dunham stars as Aura, a veiled version of herself: a recent grad of Oberlin College, where she made biographical shorts (Dunham’s actual college films), who moves back in with her mother, a photographer who specializes in scenes composed of doll furniture (played by Dunham’s actual mother Laurie Simmons, a photographer who specializes in scenes composed of doll furniture), and sister Nadine (portrayed by Dunham’s actual sibling Cyrus Grace Dunham).
Albeit a grown-ass adult, Aura is selfish, entitled, and immature, prone to toddler-grade meltdowns and cuddling in her mother’s lap afterward — qualities that are, to Dunham’s credit, played for laughs.
She and her friends are also, though, comfortable in their bodies to the point that it’s awkward, effusive in their affection for each other to levels that are insincere, and educated and cultured to a degree that it feels like a competitive sport. Yet these lively, witty, deeply flawed women are saddled with douchebags whom they’ve not yet realized aren’t good enough for them.
Aura and Hannah Horvath and their ilk are messy, self-absorbed, and kind of terrible. The thing is, Dunham knows that, but makes clear in this generous, sympathetic ode that loves them anyway.
Tiny Furniture (2010), directed by Lena Dunham (Criterion Channel)
‘Daisies’
Could Czech New Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová have anticipated how her 1966 masterwork Daisies would resonate with the twenty-first century influencer aesthetic of Instagram and TikTok? Possibly.
Not to say that social media stars are consciously driven by the same motivation as Maria I (Jitka Cerhová) and Maria II (Ivana Karbanová): the world is bad, so we’re going to be bad too. But what follows is a smorgasbord of signature social content: fancy meals (paid for by older men deftly dispatched on trains headed out of town), wild nights out, craftily curated bedrooms, and lots and lots of food.
Chytilová’s avant-garde visuals too foresee the filters and effects and editing that embellish our daily lives for the screen, her frame a stage in which the Marias perform like marionettes and manipulated with tints, changes in aspect ratio, stop-motion animation, and more.
Chytilová, though, is skewering the gluttonous lifestyle that so much of social media seems to celebrate. After their path of destruction culminates in an epic food fight, Maria and Maria express regret, wondering if they can mend what they’ve destroyed and seeking happiness through good behavior and hard work.
But like behind-the-scenes exposés that reveal how accessories, camera angles, and Photoshop mask reality online, their attempt to clean up their mess is a shoddy version of the original.
Daisies (1966), directed by Věra Chytilová (Criterion Channel)
