Ostensible cookie-cutter straight couple Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) are walking down the street to a gathering when they witness an act of violence. The perpetrators resemble a greaser squad complete with leather jackets and slicked back hair and who the credits identify as “the Young Gents,” and for the remainder of Please Baby Please, writer and director Amanda Kramer’s eccentric third feature, the couple can’t get this gang of hoodlums off their minds. What ensues is a kind of one crazy night narrative, beginning with Suze and Arthur discussing the matter and their thoughts on gender roles with a group of friends, a roundelay that introduces some of Kramer’s guiding thesis statements. This conversation is followed by the pair’s various imagined and real(?) journeys, separately and together, down the streets of their unnamed metropolis, into nightclubs and movie theaters, plumbing the depths of their own erotically charged fantasies.
If the above description sounds more than a little like Eyes Wide Shut, you’re on the right track. Please Baby Please is something of a queer spin on Stanley Kubrick’s monumental final work, right down to its extramarital encounters fraught with meaning and doubt as well as the neon-lit bar the husband character visits — dubbed the Blue Angel here. What Kramer’s movie also shares with Kubrick’s is a pervading sense of artifice. Eyes Wide Shut was famously shot entirely on a London soundstage despite the centrality of New York City to its plot and carries with it a general air of uneasy displacement. Please Baby Please is nominally set in the 1950s, but never really seems to be rooted in that era, partly due to the characters’ quite contemporary feelings of gender dysphoria and their openness and articulate way of expressing these sensations. Additionally, Please Baby Please is a quasi-musical, with its cast occasionally breaking into choreographed dance routines and song, often to denote a full-blown immersion into someone, often Suze’s, dream space.
It’s a potentially clever way of cluing the audience in to inner rumblings of sexual (in all its meanings) dissatisfaction—by assembling an aesthetic that never translates as “authentic,” always registering at a kind of remove. And it mostly works in Please Baby Please, though the viewing experience is one of constantly wondering if the way it feels divorced from conventional ideas of naturalism is more frustrating than it is trying to be. It would be unfair to hold an up and coming director like Kramer to the standards of a director of Kubrick’s stature (especially in his mighty closing salvo), but Eyes Wide Shut is constantly luring you in even as it’s pushing you away, whereas sometimes Please Baby Please forgets or is unable to draw us in to its obtuseness.
An encounter with the owner of the Blue Angel, Billy (Cole Escola) midway through the film, is one place the movie’s distanciation and stylization succeeds without reservation. Suze and her pal Ida (Alisa Torres) come across Billy in drag in a phone booth and Billy breaks into song. The number isn’t “good” in any recognizable way — Escola is, seemingly intentionally, off-key — but partly due to the actor’s incredible commitment, the scene works as an apt capturing of Suze’s occasional yet ardent desire to be another person altogether, one who she is perhaps unable to manifest based on circumstance. (The character is wont to dip into a Streetcar-era Marlon Brando routine, at one point professing, “we all want to be Stanley Kowalski getting a woody from our own power!”). The phone booth scene is as much a precise approximation of the tribulations of realizing one’s identity as it is a reminder of the secret-weapon talent of Escola, who also impressed in a gender fluid role on the TV series Search Party.
Sometimes, Please Baby Please can play as overly declarative of its musings on the frustrating constrictions of societal norms, especially the lines Kramer and co-writer Noel David Taylor give to Arthur. And in other instances, the film’s fantasy sequences, like a final act glimpse of Suze and the greasers writhing around each other, come across as too arranged and dioramic to be believable as vital, potent extensions of desire. Indeed, not unlike Matthew Rankin’s 2020-released period piece oddity Twentieth Century, at certain points Please Baby Please seems to be attempting to conjure the phantasmagoric more than it is simply embodying it. But these ideas, visual and intellectual, have the markings of an artist in Kramer finding her footing, promising something great down the line once she fully comes into her capabilities on a filmmaking level.
Photo courtesy of Music Box Films
The post Please Baby Please appeared first on Spectrum Culture.