anybody can desire change
by Douglas
Messerli
Amanda Kramer
and Noel David Taylor (screenplay), Amanda Kramer (director) Please Baby
Please / 2022
As the Wikipedia
entry for writer/director Amanda Kramer’s crazy and joyous romp through issues
of gender in her semi-musical Please Baby Please
reveals, to play along with the film’s sometimes
poetic aphorisms: “sometimes plot is not where you want to go, sucking you into
its pure rot of the flow of a tale you might not really want to fully follow or
finally know.” I have now seen this 95-minute spectacle two times, and even
then I could not comprehend what that Wiki encyclopedic entry was really
talking about. Forget it, join me in a quick walk-through of this play on queer
identity row.
Of course, there is a story. Even abstract films
have a story to tell. But here, it hardly matters. Much like Brad Majors and
Janet Weiss in The Rocky Horror
Picture Show, newlyweds Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur
(Harry Melling) happen upon a campy 2022 version of a 1950s greaser gang whose
brutal murder of a seemingly innocent couple which they are forced to witness,
absolutely startles them. Their mouths drop open in wonderment. As the gang
finally turns their eyes upon this other set of innocents, there is something
so engaging and compelling about them that they let them go, demanding only the
information of the number of the apartment in which this soon-to-be-transformed
bohemian couple live, 2B, to where they are allowed to return, living out their
lives of normalcy—well given Hamlet’s own self-doubts, maybe not for long.
At a gathering of their friends, the
couple express their new-found beliefs after having gone through the shocking
experience. As Tara Brady, writing in the Irish
Times summarizes it:
“From the
get-go, newlyweds Suze (Riseborough) and Arthur (Melling) are struggling with
his passivity (“I will not be terrorised into acting like a savage just because
I was born male”) and his attraction to Teddy, the psychopathic head of local
hoodlums the Young Gents. Suze responds
In fact, these witticisms are at the heart of this movie. I’ll share only a few, which out of context lose their punch, most of them expressed by a suddenly snarling Suze who has evidently discovered her inner Alla Nazimova through which to express her deepest dominant female, somewhat lesbian longings and newly discovered aphorisms:
“We are the
fantasy. We like to get off. We don’t like to mince or whimper or hop around. I
sure want a more important job than making Arthur happy.”
Her friend Ida (Alisa Torres), also
transformed by her friend, flashes back: “Your importance to Arthur has far
more to do with how much you can hurt him than how happy you can make him.”
“What is our marriage then, a strange sort
of friendship that started out with a few sexual privileges?” Suze retorts. “Yeah.
That’s marriage.”
For his part, after encountering the pretty
boy head of the Young Gents, Arthur, seems to have found a new attitude with
regard to his expected male authority: “I am a man. But I don’t feel to need to
need to act male. It’s hard to believe I was even born male. I’ve never been
enough of a genuine man to suggest I am one so maybe I’m not one. Boy, what a
kick!”
When their friends, Ida, Baker, and Les
leave, a strange mesmerizing dance occurs between the couple wherein, taking up
a bottle of wine to use as a penis, Suze becomes a man to her prostrating man,
now on the floor. Roles are clearly been switched.
As Arthur takes the trash out he finds a
blood-stained matchbook from The Blue Angel Club, a gang gay bar, to which
Arthur now marches off, obviously obsessed by the gang leader Teddy.
Suze meanwhile encounters an apartment
house neighbor who she’s never before met, Maureen (a fabulous Demi Moore),
asking for help with her grocery bags, and, as Irish
Times critic Baker rightfully rhapsodizes, is dress in a leopard
print, “rasping, ‘These are the slums, and I’m a slum starlet,’ [who] seems to
have wandered in from John Waters’s enduring Pink
Flamingos.” When Suze describes her experience with the
Young Gents, Maureen herself takes ups her own lament on the nature on men,
only to be interrupted by her lover Billy (an early glimmering of the endless
talents of Cole Escola) who can’t find the apartment keys Maureen hides in
various spots around the entrance. Finally realizing that she herself has the
only keys left, and that she is about to leave for Europe, Maureen hands over
the treasures to Suze to watch her apartment in her absence.
At the Blue Angel Club, meanwhile, Arthur
cruises the floor, staring longingly at Teddy, as the gang leader flirts with
the leather-boy bartender. The new boy Arthur daringly follows Teddy into the
bathroom where Teddy and the bartender have escaped, obviously for a sexual rendezvous.
Their encounter does not at all end up with the sexual engagement one
might have expected, Arthur being still far too “uptight” to allow that Teddy’s
murders and his plans for yet another “big fight” are permissible. But it’s
clear as Teddy merely smiles before grabbing Arthur’s chin that there is
another meeting in store between the two of them.
Alone in Maureen’s apartment, Suze now
has a musical fantasy about the Young Gents who, while she dressed in underwear
while they appear in fetish gear, she challenges them to do whatever it is they
might do.
But she and Arthur are, after all, only
bohemians, not Jets or Sharks out of some West
Side Story fantasy concoction, let alone confused transsexual
“anybody’s, and both are moved by Les’ (Yedoye Travis) poetry, read with Baker
(Marquis Rodriguez) accompanying him on drums. One of the audience members,
Dickie (Ryan Simpkins) is also highly affected by the insipid beat poetry,
while Joanne (Jaz Sinclair) openly howls in laughter. An argument regarding
their various forms of behavior soon interrupts the reading, upon which Les
asks them both to leave, while Baker, given Suze’s previous description,
recognizes Dickie as the lesbian member of the Young Gents gang. While Suze hurls
bottles at Dickie, Arthur turns away unable to look the Young Gents in the face
after having established such a close relationship with Teddy. The gang,
apparently, has already entered Suze and Arthur’s own beatnik turf.
After the reading, Suze and Ida walk down
their “dangerous” neighborhood streets, Ida muttering on about the nature of
women, marriage, and female friendship, while Suze fantasizes what she might do
if she were a man. There, in one of the most resplendent moments of this film,
they encounter Billy, in full drag, crying into a payphone while stuffed into
the brightly-lit booth he begs his lover to let him come back. Suze is
emotionally moved.
As the Young Gents becomes more and more
aggressive to the couple in 2B, Arthur and Suze discuss the changes in each of
them, trying to analyze their own love and wondering if they are still truly “in
love.” As his own clarinet is tossed through their bedroom window by the noisy
gang members below, Arthur can assure her only that his love is only “for now.”
But even their “moment” has disappeared
when, as Arthur goes to close the door, a stranger opens a nearby closet to
reveal Teddy, severely bloodied and beaten, who now hangs on to Arthur to beg
him to allow the Young Gents to hide out in his and Suze’s apartment.
The
rest of the movie, in fact, turns into a kind of fantasy world wherein both
Arthur and Suze move off toward their increasingly “other” realities which they
realize they’ve long desired, consisting of various “altercations” as they seek
out their new identities.
Once more in the Blue Angel Club where
Suze sits with Arthur, he attracts a male’s attention, in this case Billy’s,
who flirts with Arthur, describing a theory of life which, he insists, he’ll
share with Arthur “some blue night.” Suze insists that he share it “now,”
apparently terrified by any “blue night” in the future, Billy merely smirking
in mockery, declaring that they both are acting “queer,” leaving Suze in a
furious rage as she screams, flips over the table, and grabs Arthur’s hand to
pull him away from the evil den of sexual depravity.
Yet when they soon after come upon the
Young Gents, busy stripping Joanne’s father’s car, they are involved with yet
another murderous incident. Joanne, playing a kind of ghost version of “Truth
or Dare,” challenges the gang members to a contest where they will reveal their
most vulnerable feelings. Teddy quickly volunteers, a bit like Arthur expressing
his resentment of the pressures of being compared to other men. Joanne is moved
by his revelation, but as she expresses her feelings, the gang member Lon (Jake
Choi) puts a knife into her neck, killing her. Arthur screams in horror, Teddy
coming to his rescue, warning him that the Young Gents are now targeting them,
and that he is now no longer permitted to return the keys to their apartment.
The
forceful Suze immediately agrees to trade their owns keys for Maureen’s,
arguing they that can steal her stuff instead. Affectionately responding to
Arthur, he promises he will try to make a deal.
In several further “fantasies,” and imaginary
encounters, Suze finally gets to hear Billy’s “theory of life,” that all humans
are living on a dying planet “full of impossible obstacles,” without quite
realizing that she herself has become one of the greatest obstacles, at least
as far as Arthur is concerned, and perhaps working against her own better
welfare.
In yet another imaginary playing out of usurped
male empowerment, Teddy and the lesbian Dickie kiss and stroke Suze as the
other Young Gents dance around her, she shouting out the film’s title, “Please,
baby, please,” while accepting the pain of her own iron as they brand her ass.
Having stolen a theatre ticket stub from
Teddy’s leather jacket pocket, Suze heads out for a performance in what turns
out to be a gay porn theater, as she enters the dreamland world where she is
asked if Teddy is her husband, while she laments that she has no way to satisfy
him.
But once more, even in such fantasies,
Suze learns nothing through the information they convey, seeking even now a traditional
moral compass of normalcy as she encounters a cop at the back of the theater,
about to bust the place which he describes if filled with “criminal queers.”
Telling here to leave, she does.
But clearly the two cannot continue to
leave in both worlds. As the two entertain, once more, their friends Ida,
Baker, and Les, with Suze dancing as a figure of bohemian allurement, the Young
Gents break in, holding all of them hostage. The former outsider Gene goes off
to rob Maureen’s apartment, insisting that Teddy, Dickie, and Lon watch the
hostages. When Lon mocks Arthur for marrying Suze, the woman who has long been
seeking to use her male powers, stabs him to death, demanding like one of the
furies that her friends immediately leave, while reminding the edgy Dickie that
it was Lon who killed Joanne, and that it’s only fair justice.
Dickie brings the real back into the film
by punching her in the eye.
When Suze goes to Maureen's apartment she
finds the remaining Young Gents, as well as Billy and Maureen's husband all dead
with Maureen is stroking her husband’s head. Suze, her fingers still covered in
blood, puts up a blood-soaked cigarette to her mouth, Maureen remarking that
she's now "nobody's wife,”
Queerly, so it first appears, normalcy has
won the day, as much later Arthur conducts an orchestra while images of Suze
and Teddy appear upon a split screen. On one side, Suze, now sporting a sort
haircut (with still her black eye from presumably her encounter with Dickie—or perhaps
not), dresses up in something approximating Teddy’s leathers. On the other
side, as in many an MGM musical, Arthur dances his way home, jumping literally
across the sides of the building’s roof in his joyful hoofing his way back to
happiness.
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The screen opens up, however, as he enters
his flat, where we see Teddy waiting, whom Arthur now fully engages in a series
of deep kisses, the drag version of Teddy, Suze, hugging his butt as if ready
to fuck the man she once called her husband. Evidently they have all found
their place in the 50s society just in time to enter the 1960s newfound sexual
liberations.
Even in 2022, some critics still couldn’t
get it, the fact that feminist aspirations and gay self-acceptance worked
utterly hand-in-hand, although I will say they are quite strangely represented
in this film given that the solution, evidently, is becoming a butch dyke—a choice
certainly Betty Freidan, who by the mid-1960s had purged lesbians from the
feminist movement in her role as leader of the National Organization for Women
(NOW), would have most certainly have disapproved. Writing in The
Wrap, for example, Lena Wilson makes some interesting
points:
“At least
Arthur’s motivations make sense—it must be destabilizing to be in a
heterosexual marriage in the 1950s and suddenly feel homosexual attraction.
Suze is more of a puzzler. After seeing the Young Gents murder two civilians,
she asks Arthur to be less “precious” with her and tells him she wants to be
“beneath” him. Her upstairs neighbor Maureen fascinates her with questions of
female empowerment and submission.
Suze grapples with her role as a wife,
unsure how to please her husband in this brave new world. “How do I give it to
him the way he wants to get it?” she asks a random butch (Mary Lynn Rajskub) in
a movie theater.
In some ways, it’s a subversive question,
as 1950s housewives were hardly encouraged to “give it” to their husbands. But
Suze is still focused on how best to be a pleasing wife. While Arthur has a
rendezvous with his leather-clad love, Suze remains steadfast in her marriage.
If her new love of leather is meant to signify some latent lesbianism—the
theatergoer calls her a “butchie”; a gay man calls her a “dyke”—she certainly
never walks the walk.”
I presume, however, that after embracing
and perhaps even penetrating, with an attachement, her husband’s thin buttocks
dressed up in her leather duds, that Suze will move out soon after to new
territory where she might find better places in which to “give it” to anyone
who might seek out her love. We can only hope her pleas of “Baby, please,”
eventually reach the right ears. Actually, Dickie might have been the perfect
candidate, presumably the only “Young Gents” other than Teddy who survived
their local genocide.
And the point still has been made. The
male coming out was and will be always a holler for the female to move out of
the kitchen into the greater world at large, just as the movement of women into
the work force and general society was a call out for gay men to leave their
closets for the daylight.
Los
Angeles, August 24, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2024).
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