Theda Hammel returns to Sundance following her 2022 TV pilot My Trip To Spain, with her feature debut as writer-director-composer-editor and star, Stress Positions, playing in the festival’s US Dramatic Competition. With its dry, sometimes uncomfortable tone, that easily shifts from offbeat to satirical to absurd to farcical, this deliciously dark, thought-provoking comedy sees her deliver on the promise of that episode, as she continues to establish her distinctive voice and point of view as a creator and performer.
It is a pretty bold move to set a film in New York over summer 2020—a time that most of us would rather not revisit—but that boldness pays off. Never relying on the setting, Hammel instead deftly uses its all-too-familiar details with specificity to add fuel to the fire of her protagonist’s circumstances, heighten the humour, and draw out the film’s thematic concerns. It is a portrait of chaotic characters set against a suitably chaotic backdrop.
The film sees Hammel reunite with her My Trip To Spain co-star John Early, making for a delightfully abrasive aging millennial on-screen pairing. Early is perfect as the highly-strung Terry Goon who has recently been left by his wealthy hedonistic husband Leo (John Roberts) for another man. As the divorce papers sit waiting to be signed by Terry, he is quarantining in one of Leo’s many properties, a Brooklyn brownstone that is ordinarily used as his “party house”. As Terry’s best friend since high school, Karla (Hammel), fills us in on the details of Terry’s situation—with her engaging, gossipy, and self-absorbed voice-over narration—we see him trying to hide any signs of the house’s usual purpose, including hilariously struggling to roll a giant disco ball down the stoop stairs.
Terry isn’t alone, having taken in a house guest, his Moroccan nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash). He’s a model on the cusp of his twentieth birthday who everyone Terry speaks to is fascinated by and wants to meet, including Leo. At times the film’s perspective shifts from Karla’s narration to Bahlul’s lyrical reflections as he lays in bed with his broken leg in a cast, mainly confined to the basement of the house. With ambitions of writing a novel, the young man contemplates his life in America and strained relationship with his religious mother, haunted by a distant memory of a fateful trip with her to Fire Island for Terry and Leo’s wedding.
The brownstone also comes with a rather eccentric and enigmatic figure, Coco (a wonderful Rebecca F. Wright), an older woman who lives on the top floor and observes everything that goes on in the house. She’s a COVID-skeptic who reluctantly goes along with hyper-anxious Terry’s precautions of mask-wearing (his own preference is a gas mask) and his liberal Lysol sanitizing, whenever she ventures downstairs or into the backyard.
Massage therapist Karla, who is trans, lives with her cis girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), whom she strongly resents, both for being vegan, and for having had a successful book that features an unflattering character that Karla insists is based upon her. Her experience of having had her life laid bare in Vanessa’s book has led Karla to believe that writers should only rely on their imaginations for their inspiration, not use the world immediately around them as source material. As narrator of the action unfolding in the film though, she appears to be perfectly comfortable with telling us everybody else’s business. Karla doesn’t have full ownership of the storytelling though. Along with Bahlul’s poetic musings, we also watch some events unfold with Coco, and although he does not get a voice-over, we spend time with one of the film’s initially more sympathetic characters, a GrubHub delivery guy Ronald (Faheem Ali), as he works through the pandemic.
Hammel’s comic timing as an actor is impeccable, as illustrated in an extended sequence when Karla attempts to go viral on social media, posting a video of her performatively burning the US flag to her 90 followers on TikTok. As a filmmaker, she also knows just the right moment to throw in some 7pm pot-banging for essential workers, bring in an intense encounter with a disheveled stranger desperate for a phone, mention the city-wide curfew, and introduce the sound of firecrackers, sirens, and helicopters overhead, to keep things bubbling. One of my favourite moments sees a woman in a silver sequin dress being photographed on the street at night posing around an open fire hydrant while the world burns, oblivious to what’s happening right in front of her eyes. Meanwhile, Karla and Terry are clueless in their interactions with anyone they encounter who isn’t white, and full of assumptions and generalizations about the Middle East, where they think Morocco is. Astutely observed, Hammel skillfully plays in the tension between their unvarnished opinions and attempts to say what they think is the right thing.
Hammel clearly revels in the irreverence of creating refreshingly messy trans and queer characters—pushing against the historical burden of expectation to deliver positive screen representation of “nice”, well-behaved LGBTQ+ people—showing us that we can be just as deeply flawed, ignorant, contradictory, and cringe-inducing, as any cis and straight folks can be. As that summer’s social justice protests shape the national conversation, much of what Terry and Karla say about identity and race is awkward and insensitive, but Hammel gives them the space to make mistakes without judging them too harshly in this pressure cooker of a movie.
By James Kleinmann
Stress Positions world premiered in the US Dramatic Competition on the opening night of the 40th Sundance Film Festival.
NEON will release Stress Positions at New York’s IFC Center on Friday, April 19th with Theda Hammel and John Early in person at select showtimes, with the film expanding to Los Angeles and Additional Select Cities on Friday, April 26th.
