If the depictions of the early COVID shenanigans didn’t wear you down to the limit, then the satire Stress positions (now streaming on Hulu) could be your comedy session, where you generously tip the Uber Eats guy and wipe down the groceries with Clorox cleaning wipes. The film, the feature debut of writer-director Theda Hammel, zooms in on a handful of Brooklynites trying to figure out what to do with their egos in the context of a global pandemic. It veers between vicious and flippantly funny, and unfocused in a starkly artistic way—almost certainly on purpose, leaving us to either just put up with the sleazy weirdness or try to fathom some interpretive meaning. Either way, it could be worthwhile.
The essentials: Terry (John Early) rolls a disco ball down the front steps of a Brooklyn brownstone. It’s huge. Unwieldy. It’s no exaggeration to say he’s practically wrestling with it. Symbolism alert: The giant glittery ball belonged to his ex-husband Leo. Leo threw it away. The divorce papers are inside, and Terry didn’t sign them. The brownstone belongs to Leo, who has been using it as a “party house.” It’s a run-down but livable shithole. And Terry is stuck there. The year is 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic. Terry has been unemployed for a long time and looks disheveled — as if the leaderless partying has suddenly stopped and the hangover isn’t over yet — and has the frazzled demeanor of someone who thinks he’s unemployed.capableAlso in his care, in a bed in the basement, is his nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), who broke his leg in a scooter accident and had no one to help him except his uncle, who is a failure.
All of Terry’s variously queer friends want to come to Bahlul’s, since he’s 19 and a model and of exotic heritage — he’s Muslim, his father is Moroccan — and seems pretty innocent and sexually seductive. But of everyone in the film, Terry takes COVID so seriously that he douses a $20 bill with Lysol and puts on a chemical warfare gas mask before greeting the Grubhub guy, who is initially a peripheral character but the frequency of his food deliveries makes it necessary to have him sixth or seventh in the bill. His name is Ronald (Faheem Ali). So visitors are forbidden. Sometimes Terry has upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Wright) come down to fix the internet and smoke a cigarette with Bahlul, but Terry urges everyone to wear masks. Until the cigarettes come out, of course. Terry has no control here. Let’s face it.
Terry does all the COVID stuff, like dabbling in recipes and banging pots and pans in solidarity with first responders and wallowing in existential despair. He drops a raw chicken fillet and slips on it, twisting his back, and that’s the entry point for Karla (Hammel), who comes by after weeks of distress. She’s going to give him a massage, she says, but instead she steals a bottle of vodka, lays Bahlul on the picnic table, and helps him stretch his hips. Literally – it’s not overtly sexual, or, come to think of it, maybe it is. The conversations with Karla are wild – everyone says stupid shit about Muslims (“Buhlal isn’t gay, he’s religious”) and the Middle East, although no one really knows which countries constitute the “Middle East.” Notably, Bahlul speaks in parts of this film for a book he is writing, and there are connections to flashbacks of his mother, Terry’s sister. Karla also speaks in parts, apparently because her partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) has written a book about Karla, “The Trans Person,” and Karla needs to regain some control over her story. But control is an illusion, and you must remember that!
What movies will it remind you of?: Stress positions combines the COVIDisms of Blocked with the strange taste of Fire Island and the unconventional indie sensibility of Shiva-Baby.
Remarkable performance: Hammel plays a sort of casual agent of chaos, and her biting comic dialogue provides most of the laughs in the film.
Memorable dialogue: Karla sums up her transformation succinctly, pointing to her body: “I wanted to kill myself – that somehow helped me.”
Sex and skin: Nothing obvious, although there is an out-of-frame suggestion of a heavy battery-powered tool lodged in a certain orifice—a battery-powered tool that is not designed to get stuck in a certain body opening, mind you.
Our opinion: Stress positions is a film that’s hard to like: its characters are unfamiliar and often unsympathetic, surely intentionally so; Hammel’s script is devoid of conventional points of view; and her direction can be manic, handheld cameras fidgeting in tight spaces and showing no interest in setting contextual visual boundaries beyond a prevailing sense of uncomfortable claustrophobia. At times, Bahlul narrates over images of Terry’s mindless antics in the apartment, and Hammel keeps us off balance with a variety of odd angles and distorted images.
But it doesn’t fade from memory. In fact, it’s slowly becoming more than the sum of its rather disparate parts. Sure, Hammel satirizes the two extremes of COVID personalities in Terry’s hyper-paranoia and routine posturing (he really does the pots and pans thing half-heartedly) and Karla’s unspoken whatever approach to the protocol, as extensions of their various forms of personal despair. But beyond that, the characters’ inability to to fool oneselfeven if only for a minute or two to reflect on the rest of the world, or to reflect on the ignorance of their very different political views, represents a key idea in miniature: This global pandemic has not brought us together to suffer together. Rather, it has been a fragmentation, an exposure of people for what they really were. The crisis was an abstraction for many—and that’s the difference between the spread of a deadly virus we can’t see and, say, an earthquake that traps people under rubble and prompts passersby to jump in and dig.
Hammel makes sure everyone gets on the wrong track here—her portrayal of trans and gay people goes beyond their implied social and psychological suffering to insist that queers can be just as self-centered assholes as everyone else. Stress positions continually challenges us with its distorted, chaotic perspectives. It’s a film that’s hard to like, but one whose methodology and frame of reference are consistently fascinating.
Our call: Stress positions isn’t for everyone, but it will reward those who rise to the challenge. So STREAM it and look forward to Hammel’s future projects.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
