This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
Through their film Stress Positions (2023), Theda Hammel exposes the ugly core of leftist posturing and skin-deep politics through the genre of farce, invoking a cast of New York millennials who seem to operate on a baseline of narcissism. In the Q-and-A after the screening, Hammel described her characters as “Trumpian” in their shared pursuit of attention. For Trump, the greatest insult is not being framed as morally corrupt, rather as un-newsworthy because the logic of his politics is not embedded in a systematic ideology, it is reactionary and personal. Similarly, almost every character in Stress Positions is obsessed with their own image, embodying America’s cultural anxiety of irrelevance in the face of otherness.
The film takes place in Brooklyn at the beginning of the pandemic, and follows Terry (John Early) as he imposes a quarantine on himself and his nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a 19-year-old Moroccan model. The majority of the film takes place in Terry’s home, a brownstone that belongs to his ex-husband Leo (John Roberts). The revolving door setting reveals a dysfunctional cast of characters who are each drawn to the mystique of Bahlul. Terry’s old friend Karla (Theda Hammel), and her partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), personify the concerns of bourgeois millennial New Yorkers. Having pilfered her girlfriend’s life story for her novel, Vanessa attempts to claw back some integrity through her religious veganism. The more frenetic scenes are contrasted with Bahlul’s poetic reflections on identity, as we see fragments of his mother captured in eerie home videos. As a white woman who converted to Islam and married a Moroccan man, Bahlul’s mother embodies the new age movement, one that is embraced by millennials and zoomers alike.
At its darkest, Stress Positions is about the existential aloneness that surfaced for many during the pandemic. There is no benevolent God in Hammel’s world, and each character ultimately confronts their own spiritual decay. This is also the comedy of the film, where Terry’s incompetence as a proxy father of Bahlul manifests in his physical clumsiness. To a Gen-Z audience, Terry is the personification of cringe, and as a former Christopher Hitchens enthusiast, he has slowly disassociated from politics as an identity. Compared to the other characters, he is most vigilant about the threat of the virus, and by extension, his own self-preservation. At the same time, he fails to maintain the physical space of the house, and all of his relationships. The camera also affords him little dignity, as he slips on raw chicken in a sequence of physical comedy so funny that it is painful.
Hammel leans into a wide variety of conventions, weaving the rules of farce and drama into a theatrically self-reflexive form. The film begins with voiceover, read by Hammel’s character, and continues to alternate between unreliable narrators. Each character is locked in their own unique ‘stress position’, and the viewer is another domestic hostage of the brownstone. Karla is trapped in a monogamous lesbian relationship, confining herself within a web of her own lies. Bahlul is trapped in a cast, straddling the liminal space between youth and adulthood. He is defined by the role of the subject; his image is constantly appropriated by the other characters and the gaze of the audience.
As Hammel observed, in the pandemic, it became glaringly clear that governments often guess their way into the project of national prudence. For Bahlul, becoming an adult during the pandemic induces the awareness that there is no benign mentor in his life. As Karla instructs Bahlul, “fiction is freedom”, and lying is liberatory. At the same time, Karla emotes a pathological apathy, where her political lesbianism is devoid of any real substance. Whether Bahlul accepts Karla’s mantra is kept ambiguous. At the end of the film, the audience is left trying to make sense of the fiction of Bahlul’s life.
