"Fair Play" & "Bottoms" Reviews: Subverting the Patriarchy is Costly
Films in which females act against gender type and suffer the consequences.
Fair Play is streaming on Netflix.
Grade: A- (It’s not what you think and it makes you think long after the credits go out. Trigger Warning: Graphic sex scenes & sexual assault)
Bottoms is out in theaters.
Grade: B+ (It’s funny and inclusive. Female positive and also patriarchy-questioning, think “Barbie” for irreverent high school set )
On the surface, you wouldn’t pair an erotic thriller with an irreverent comedy, but hear me out for a second.
In one, there’s a high school female fight club that becomes the target of derision and hate by the much loved and admired men’s high school football team. In the other, the girl gets the job her fiance wants only to have him punish her for perpetrating the crime of being the most fit for the job she earned and doing it well.
Both films are challenging the status quo in ways that shouldn’t be controversial and yet are and elicit violent and vindictive responses from the opposite sex. The message is clear. Girls aren’t supposed to want to brawl and use physicality as a mechanism for bonding. They aren’t supposed to get the job that their boyfriends want and if they do, they shouldn’t want it or at the very least, they should act like they don’t want it. They are meant to cheer them on.
Note to reader: I’m really not trying to sound too much like America Ferrera’s Gloria speech in Barbie.
“Fair Play” Review
The premise of Fair Play is simple. The girlfriend gets the job that her boyfriend believes he deserves at the very competitive NYC hedge fund company where they both work. The nuance here is that the boyfriend firmly believes she didn’t earn it, well at least by way of her professional performance. The film suggestively implies that he thinks she slept her way to the title.
The movie starts with the boyfriend, Luke, played by Alden Ehrenreich (a standout in Oppenheimer) introducing his soon-to-be fiancee, Emily (Phoebe Dynevor, Bridgerton S1) a physically striking woman, to his family at his brother’s wedding. You cringe a bit when the guys comment about how beautiful Emily is as if she’s not there and she’s clearly not 100% comfortable, but she quickly pivots this discomfort into reassurance in the way of sex. And so Luke and Emily engage in a very unsexy sexual act in the bathroom, a balance of power restored. There’s blood involved and this is the gun in Act 1.
Emily’s unexpected promotion is the catalyst for the unraveling of her threadbare relationship with Luke. Predictably, he slowly devolves into a sort of detached, jealous and angry zombie who is unable or unwilling to support Emily. She tries to placate him and in true victim form, feels guilty for her promotion and assures him repeatedly through words and action that she will do whatever she can, even if it means putting her own job at jeopardy, to see him promoted.
For Luke and Emily, intimacy equates with sex. It’s the part of the movie that felt weakest to me. The sex replaces any form of verbal communication or understanding and the distrust is visible here betrayed by way of the physical - abrupt body gestures, eye rolls, etc. They are gorgeous, young and ambitious, both hiding their relationship from the firm they work, a place that oozes a bit with other nefarious firm depictions (namely, the one Tom Cruise fought so hard to get out of in the John Grisham adaptation from 1993) and this clandestine element is also a turn on for them both, even though this is not a new relationship.
And yet…The interesting thing about the film is not the stuff that feels predictable - like the interpersonal dynamic between an entitled mid bro (who got the job “as a favor” Emily’s boss shared) and a finance dynamo who was in The Wall Street Journal at 17 and is the best at what she does and yet totally underestimated [until she isn’t]. For Emily to succeed in Wall Street means she has had to continually act the part of the “bird who has had to run a mile” (an analogy her new boss makes when describing her trajectory) with the inference being she needs to dumb herself down in a predominantly male environment to make it and not be seen as a threat.
At the beginning of the film you barely pay any mind to Emily’s abilities and this is intentional because Chloe Lamont, the director, is so laser focused on Luke’s succession to the throne of the firm’s managers that you totally discount Emily. She’s a prop, there to elevate Luke. You don’t question Luke’s qualifications because he looks and sounds like everyone else at the firm where and fits the mold. Emily’s however? Her quals come under constant scrutiny and give way to an undercurrent of brutality as the movie proceeds. And that’s where you feel the rug being pulled out from under you.
The story picks up in pace in the third act. The tension between Luke and Emily at peak as his rotting stench of failure at being a decent human/partner and her feeling the sting of his continual spoken and unspoken psychological and verbal abuse rise. Emily, assimilating to the frat atmosphere at work, suggests the work guys go to a stripper club and then once there, complains to them that she never gets any (sex), which apparently translates as crass if a woman says it, but the guys all share a laugh anyways.
The couple that together has never had to confront the ugly realities of patriarchy find themselves smack dab in the center of the storm of their making, but really a machination of the world that spit them out. In such a world, Emily can’t win. The system is rigged against her. She’s too beautiful, too smart. “Too bad she’s a woman. What a waste.” you can imagine her male peers at the firm recanting. Luke, however average a person he may be, just might win. And in the battle between Luke and Emily, neither makes it out unscathed.
“Bottoms” Review
“A movie about empowering women (the hot ones)”
Bottoms examines queer friendship and romance in a very heartfelt and funny way. Its two main characters, PJ (Rachel Senott of Shiva Baby) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri of The Bear) are unapologetically uncool and have crushes on the two hot girls played by Kaia Gerber as Brittany and Havana Rose Liu as Isabel. As a ploy to get seen by their crushes, to lose their virginity before high school ends, and capitalize on a rumor that they both spent their Summers in juvie, they start a “female solidarity club” in the hopes of scoring with the cheerleaders. The club is sponsored by one of their teachers Mr. G, played by real-life former NFL player, Marshawn Lynch, whose comedic cameos in Will Arnett’s Murderville were memorable.
One of the deceptive devices at play here is that PJ and Josie have lied to all the club members about the fact that they were in juvie which is basically the club’s origin story and serves to give it its much-needed cred. The other being the guise of female bonding when Josie and PJ were only interested in the two hot girls. You may already see where the film is going. It doesn’t deviate too much from a high school teenage comedy script. It’s its variations that set it apart. The two teenage leads are lesbians. Stifler’s mom (an American Pie reference) here is Hazel’s mom, Mrs. Callahan (Dagmara Dominczyk) who is also sleeping with Isabel’s boyfriend, the high school quarterback, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), last seen in the adaptation of the bestselling YA book, Red, White & Royal Blue. And in this story, the dim-witted, good-looking quarterback’s beautiful girlfriend has feelings for a cute, dorky girl who wears Atari shirts.
A New Yorker review of the film which was less than favorable called out the casting of the film as being the real coup. Finding all of these eclectic Gen Z talents and bringing them together and watching their collective chemistry ignite is the crowning achievement of the film. He compared the cast to the Brat Pack of the 1980s that brought us the likes of Emilio Estevez, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, Ally Sheedy and films like St. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club. You might even compare it to the 00s Millennial cool cast concoction of Jonah Hill, Seth Rogan, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Michael Cera, and Emma Stone. While I agree wholeheartedly that I would watch this cast together in more films, to say this is the crowning achievement of the film is a bit reductive and does Seligman an injustice.
“What Seligman [co-writer + director] accomplishes now is what the director [Joel] Schumacher [St. Elmo’s Fire director] accomplished then, namely, to emblematize a generation, by assembling a roster of talents who burst out from the movie’s narrow limits and instantly occupy a prominent place in the industry and in the media world at large.”
As this is a high school comedy satire, it’s natural to see analogous connections to other teenage high school dynamic films like Heathers, But I’m a Cheerleader, Mean Girls, American Pie, and even Do Revenge. This film is both an ode to those predecessors and its own unique formula updated for today’s teens, acknowledging that sexuality is fluid, girls are horny and sometimes a hot cheerleader has a crush on the quiet, dork girl, or at least in a Seligman-Sennott universe.
Have you seen either of these films? Did Fair Play come up in your Netflix queue and you thought it was too racy? I’ve been there.
Bottoms is a film from Canadian-born (Toronto) Jewish female filmmaker, Emma Seligman. Another Canadian-born Jewish female filmmaker I’m following is Chandler Levack whose debut longer-form film, I Like Movies (Description: Socially inept 17-year-old cinephile, Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his older female manager.) is going to be showcased at the Boston Jewish Film Festival in a few weeks. Levack will be there. I will be there. And let’s not forget Sarah Polley, one of my favorite filmmakers, a Canadian (Women Talking, Stories We Tell, Take this Waltz, Away from Here) and the lead actress in one of the most beautiful films ever, My Life Without Me, directed by Isabel Coixet. I mean heck, even Blondie (Debbie Harry) is in it. And Mark Ruffalo before he was phoning in a French accent.
It’s October which also means horror. I’m watching The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. What are you watching? Does the new Netflix sci-fi thriller show, Bodies count as horror? Also don’t confuse this Bodies for Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022) starring Bottoms’ Rachel Sennott and Pete Davidson. But that one is definitely horror.
Is there a new Brat Pack and is Rachel Sennott firmly one of the posse? Who else? If you had to create a Gen Z Brat Pack who would be in it?
Hi Beth - did not see either of these, but Bottoms does appeal to me more than Fair Play. It's so funny to see these "high school" movies with actors that are a decade older than the age they are playing. It helps when both Rachel and Ayo look younger than 28.
I certainly couldn't comment on the Gen Z Brat Pack question, as I'm both too old and out of the loop. I thought Sennott was excellent in Shiva Baby, but that's the only thing I've seen her in. But Edibiri seems to be able to inhabit any kind of role and I expect she'll be a sought-after actor for decades to come.
Did the Boston Jewish Film Fest already happen?