It didn’t take long — the Way We Were Then pandemic shutdown indies have begun to burp out of the film festival love canal, with Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions taking point in the charge, fresh from this winter’s Sundance. Ah, the grueling months of mandatory masking and household bubbles and take-out deliveries and ever-earlier cocktail hours — sure, it was the fifth-deadliest pandemic in documented history, but was it that much of a cataclysm for most of us? However darkly we might remember it, we’re probably not going to get any “greatest generation” props for having toughed it out, which we did mostly in front of screens and mostly in our sweats.
Hammel’s movie gets the disconnect, and plays the naive narcissism for tart laughs. Co-written with Faheem Ali, who recurs in the story as a curious GrubHub delivery worker, the film trains in on a gay/trans New York bubble so tight it could be a Habitrail. Unfortunately, the interpersonal logistics are explained rather laboriously in narration: The frazzled and infection-dreading Terry (John Early), rooming for free in the brownstone “party house” owned by his absent husband, who’s filed for divorce, is nursing his Moroccan-by-way-of-New Jersey nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a young model whose leg was broken in a car accident. On the top floor lives a witchy, mute, chain-smoking squatter (Rebecca F. Wright). Intersecting compulsively with this unit — everyone’s interested in Bahlul — is Karla (Hammel), a trans schnorrer also glomming free rent, in this case from her partner, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), a writer whose sole novel is entirely robbed, they say, from Karla’s life of hookups and trans-ness. The bickering and drinking roar on as a July 4 barbecue looms, and the lovable, wheelchair-bound Bahlul considers his future, career- and gender-identity-wise.
Once Karla’s narrational backfill lets up, the movie hits a rollicking hothouse comedy vibe, particularly in a sniping…
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