Please Baby Please

Music Box Films | Release Date: October 28, 2022

5.1	USER SCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 7 Ratings

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hnestlyontheslyFeb 3, 2023

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Amid the buzz over Andrea Riseborough's ascendancy as one of the most successful campaigners for Best Actress in Oscar history, I resolved to dust Please Baby Please off the shelf. Originally in limited release Halloween weekend of 2022, PBP grossed a little bit less than a teenager working part time at a local fast food restaurant, but its journey to cult status relies on its streaming success as of 2023. From director Amanda Kramer, PBP was billed as a cheeky satire of fragile masculinity, taking as inspiration both Streetcar Named Desire and West Side Story.

The film is replete with all of the trappings of queer culture: mesh shirts, intensely phallic prop weapons, gay nightclubs, bathroom hookups, latex, Demi Moore, even a brief musical number by a drag performer in a telephone booth. There are a number of exquisite dance numbers involving household appliances for which Andrea Riseborough really should have been nominated instead. She and her costar Harry Melling (most recently playing Edgar Allan Poe) are caught in highly stylized, dramatic dialogue that Wife describes as "listening to Vivien Leigh next to Marlon Brando," which she said without knowing that Streetcar was one of the major influences on the story. Wife has an aversion to this detached, melodramatic, highly self-aware style of speech, typified by Noah Baumbach's White Noise. It's something that I've noticed more often in the writing of a lot of film festivals, the kind of speech that's composed out of poetic anxiety, which sometimes gives off the sense of the snake eating its own tail, cinephilic commentary swallowing itself whole in lieu of real character development. Which, hey, sometimes works, and especially works if you're knocking down the fourth wall in the name of comedy.

But sometimes it's also... obnoxious? In PBP it's mostly the latter. The story is thin on commentary about the state of toxic masculinity and its precursors in the 1950s. The "twist," if there is one, is the uneasy recognition in our couple Arthur and Suze (Melling and Riseborough) that they're both queer but still love each other and want to make it work. Which, by my estimation, is more of a starting point than an end, but who am I to get in the way of a 90 minute gay self-discovery tale couched in homoerotic adaptation of classic Broadway choreography? I tried to describe the concept to a Friend the next morning and he immediately improvised a gay snap move based on the Jets and Sharks sequence that was, if not exactly replicated in PBP, at least could have plausibly been considered. Which is to say, the movie seems to have some conceptual appeal and innately joyous flair.

The cast outside of our leads is full of excellence, from Karl Glusman (of Watcher, Neon Demon, Lux Aeterna, and Nocturnal Animals, to name a few), the main love interest, is electric on screen, the heart of the film. Riseborough and Melling are mesmerizing dancers in their own rights. Ryan Simpkins (playing Dickie), one of the ensemble's nonbinary actors, has some of the most interesting plot movement of any of the film's storylines. If PBP is ever to vault itself into the storied halls of camp, it will be because of the performances of these four, but its unclear to me how much staying power this film will have without more iconic musical numbers or grounded dialogue. Amanda Kramer is much more interested in powerful images than insightful conversation and that gamble needs time to play out.… Expand

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