Jenee LaMarque’s The Feels starts out
looking like it’s going to be a lesbian version of
Bridesmaids or The Hangover. Like those
films, it’s bursting with raunchy humor, heavily improvised, and set during a
bachelorette weekend. There’s booze and drugs and all manner of pre-getting-hitched
shenanigans. But it’s also sweet and earnest and I got misty at places I legit
didn’t expect. And all of this from one of the few (maybe only?) movies
primarily about the female orgasm.
When a group of friends gather in a woodsy cabin to
celebrate the marriage of Andi (Constance Wu, Fresh Off the
Boat) and Lu (Angela Trimbur, The Final Girls and
like a thousand other things—if you’ve never seen her, you’re not paying
attention), it starts off like any other similar gathering. Distant friends
catch up, drinks flow freely, and spirits soar.
It’s all well and good and fun until, mid-drunken-mumble, it
comes out that Lu’s never had an orgasm. That news comes as a wee bit of a shock
to Andi and things take a drastic shift. Preexisting personal issues creep in,
emotions run high, friction wears away the jovial surface, and shit gets all
kinds of real. Secrets come out, tensions mount, and relationships across the
board are put to the fire.
The set up isn’t what distinguishes The
Feels. We’ve seen this scenario rendered damn near every way
imaginable at this point. And it’s not really about the female orgasm. Sure,
it’s an integral plot point—and the taboo nature of women talking openly and
positively about their sexuality and sexual pleasure will make some dudes in
the audience squirm, and that’s always fun—but it functions as the diving board
into the deep end of the relationships between the characters, which is where
the true heart of the movie lies.
It’s the chemistry that drives everything else. At least
part of this is due to the fact that most of these people are friends in real
life. LaMarque plays Lu’s sister, Nikki, who’s dealing with her own life
crisis; co-writer Lauren Parks plays Vivien, the lone single straight woman;
and LeMarque’s pal and recording artist KARYYN plays another old friend who is,
oddly enough, a recording artist.
Stand-up comics Josh Fadem and Ever Mainard add to the
off-the-cuff improv as Josh, Andi’s BFF who’s been in love with her since they
were kids, and Regular Helen, a filterless, hard-partying wingnut,
respectively. The character falls into that stock, inappropriate outlier
sidekick role that everyone of these movies has—think Melissa McCarthy in
Bridesmaids or Zach Galifianakis in The
Hangover—but I’d still watch the hell out of an entire movie’s worth
of Regular Helen outtakes.
Andi, Lu, and the others deal with real, relatable problems
in real relatable ways. Over the course of the weekend, and sandwiched between
foul-mouthed outbursts, they reflect on trust, honesty, desire, and the various
tricky things that so often trip up relationships. It all paints a funny,
poignant portrait of female friendship, romantic entanglements, and life in
general.
While it won’t blow audiences away with originality,
The Feels does what it does well. A handful of incongruous reality-show-style
confessional moments don’t jibe with the surrounding film and create a few
bumps in the structural road, but relatively minor ones. It’s never clear
whether it’s supposed to be a video booth at their wedding or something along
those lines.
A couple of these asides also quickly allude to histories of
sexual violence, which come out of nowhere and disappears with equal speed. That’s
a huge issue, one countless women deal with, but it just appears, doesn’t
connect to anything else thematically or otherwise, and evaporates. And while
it caught my attention, it’s not like the script drops a bomb or this colors everything
that follows, it’s just an odd, vaguely out of place interjection.
With a cast that’s 80% female and a crew comprised of 68%
women, The Feels is certainly an anomaly in the
male-dominated movie industry. But it’s more than a mere token or a proof-that-girls-can-be-just-as-raunchy-as-boys
picture. By now that should be readily apparent.
Heartfelt and relatable, hilarious and moving, joyous and
bawdy, The Feels held it’s world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival. From there, LeMarque and company plan to make the
rounds at other fest and this is well worth tracking down if you get the
chance. [Grade: B+]
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