Stress Positions Review

There are ways out of hell.

When I think of mean films, Cassavetes’ “Husbands,” Friedkin’s “Cruising" and Wyler’s “The Heiress” come to mind. All three are texts that twist their characters into emotional states they previously thought impossible. Theda Hammel’s “Stress Positions” is my latest addition to the mean film canon and one of the best releases of the year. 

Jamie Hood wrote for The Baffler about Annie Ernaux and the diary as a “strictly individualist modality.” Just like Enroux does with the general “we” in “The Years,” Stress Positions compresses this individuality with Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) and Karla’s (Hammel) matching diaries. They operate as a neat visual metaphor for the overwhelming cognitive pressure of an exasperated global pandemic; oscillating between internalizing social decline and dreading a mysterious material affliction. And the film remains romantic without becoming nostalgic. There’s a bite to its uncompassionate sincerity. 

Hammel’s camera is intentionally furtive. It sits at the top of a staircase and peers through heavy doorways, hides under desks and between branches, and always follows too closely behind. It lingers too long and delightfully reveals Chaplin style gags (John Early’s Terry Goon slipping on the raw chicken). We find it in seemingly futile places. A boyish shirtless statue perched on top of a hutch against peeling walls takes us to a narrow doorway. An also shirtless Bahlul is carried up the stairs, coated with a voice over as excavation of origin, interrupted by an overexposed freeze frame. This sequence sets up the text’s quintessential scene, and it starts so innocuously with the miniature statue on the hutch. The film’s mode is Ernaux-esque, as Hood puts it, in that it focuses its energy “toward the instantiation of “private” life in a broader social and historical circumstance.” A piecing together of “common time” that still feels lost almost five years later.  

There is a thread of unsettling contrasts that trail the film’s wandering visual cadence. A disco ball in broad daylight, an aging gay man hunched over in pain while images of a younger and happier version of himself are projected onto the walls and also onto his physical body, the desperately morbid goings on of a depleting brownstone formerly known as The Party House. A scene at said house shows Terry telling Karla not to post a video of herself burning the American flag because it's illegal. Terry later discovers a hidden camera in the walls of the house.

All these small yet grave agitations strip and strip away at the dignity of every character on screen. And what was the pandemic (Was! Ha!) if not a mounting repertoire of indignities? Who among us, didn’t do at least one thing that in all ways but physical kind of felt like fucking yourself in the butt with a back massager and passing out? The brilliance in the film’s structure is this trail of indignities. Between Terry’s looming divorce and Karla’s unsettling suspicion that her girlfriend hates her, the amount of self destructive coping mechanisms is endless. Meanwhile, Bahlul is all poetic fragments of a maligning white mother. The psychosexual effects of homonormativity versus the stuttering severance from a homophobic parent. This tension maintains the narrative’s lack of action in an exciting way, mostly via thrilling dialogue. 

The script is the core of the film’s mean spirit. It punches so much into conversations, cramming the saddest thing you’ve ever heard in between the set up and the punchline of a laugh out loud funny joke. Hammel wrote the screenplay based on a story by her and Faheem Ali, who plays Ronald, the world's most pragmatic chaser. The dialogue is judgemental and vulnerable while maintaining an air of complete certainty. Damning accusations are thrown around frivolously. “You both have sweet, kind, American faces.” “Oh Coco isn’t trans, she's just mentally ill.” “You’re like a Larchmont Jew, it doesn’t count.” 

Though its structural modes are similar to Ernaux, the script’s tone feels reminiscent of Anne Carson’s Antigonick, a translation of Sophocles. Beyond the parallel explorations of being paralyzed by the feeling that too much time has passed, both nail a taunting witticism that shows no remorse for its speakers. 

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From Carson’s “antigonick”:

Antigone:   I’m alone on my insides

                     I died long ago

                     who suffers more

                     I wonder who suffers more

Chorus:        your soul is blowing apart

From “Stress Positions”:

                                            Bahlul: 

                 Did you know you would be beautiful? 

                                             Karla:            

                 In fact, I did not. And nobody thought I would be. 

                                            Bahlul:          

                 But you felt like a woman inside? 

                                             Karla:  

                No, nobody feels that way. I wanted to kill myself, and this sort of helped. 

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The dialogue is bolstered by Hammel and Early’s spectacular performances. Early’s Sisyphean Terry, who first appears on screen struggling to put a disco ball into a dumpster, is played in a practiced chaos. He is the bulk of the film’s physical comedy. When Terry’s ex-husband Leo returns to The Party House, Early’s dynamic with John Roberts is immediately vile, like watching two bullies at war. From the screams and shrieks that come out of him during that scene, the way he whispers “working” in working model, down to every tick and grimace, Early’s performance is both moving and deeply irritating. 

Hammel’s Karla, besides spending the entire film looking effortlessly gorgeous, is palpably unsatisfied. In the scene where she's finally caught cheating, Hammel’s shifty eyes under the proposed aloofness of her posture in the chair feels like an obvious choice but only because it works so wonderfully well. The entire cast filled the film with moments of brilliance, like Amy Zimmer’s delivery, as Karla’s girlfriend Amanda, of  “What the fuck is Oman?” in this same scene. Or Davidson Obennebo as Hamadou saying “But he’s my fiance! Sweetie, aww,” as he’s shut out of Leo’s ambulance.  

For something I am actively denoting as mean, it must be pointed out that the film does spend a significant amount of its runtime trying to convince itself that there are in fact better days to come. That somehow, you'll find a place to put all that ‘want.’ While I wouldn’t call it optimistic, I’d argue that perhaps it is only mean in the sense that it feels like saying goodbye to something you’ll learn to miss forever. “Stress Positions” is something saccharine for the cynic. In the end everything old is new again. Another relationship ends. Someone fishes a disco ball out of the dumpster. Antigone is citing Beckett.