“Bottoms” was the happy surprise of the Provincetown International Film Festival for this reviewer. The official synopsis said, “Two unpopular queer girls in their senior year start a fight club to try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders.”

Of course, we try to approach every film with an open mind, but this old peacenik had trouble imagining she’d embrace a movie about high school girls beating each other bloody in the name of their lust for some cheerleaders. Would I enjoy a raunchy teen comedy made by twenty-somethings? 

Well, mark me out to lunch. If you promise not to tell anybody, I’ll confess that I was grateful for a good bladder, because along with the rest of the sizable audience, I laughed myself silly. 

The film is the second collaboration between director and writer Emma Seligman, and actor/co-writer Rachel Sennott, the first being “Shiva Baby” in 2020. The film is fast-paced, the wit is crackling, and the hits just keep on coming, one joke after another. In their brief presentation to the audience, the two referred to their film as stupid. Well, some dumbing down must have been just what we needed. The writing, acting, and comedic timing are first-rate here. The high school cultural milieu they have created is familiar in its hierarchical treatment of football players and cheerleaders, but absent are the racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia I grew up in. As the Rolling Stone reviewer points out:

They’re both queer and quick to point out that nobody hates them for being gay. The duo is loathed, according to them, because they’re “gay, untalented, and ugly.”

The cast of young actors is quite good, but the show is stolen by a non-actor, former NFL footballer Marshawn Lynch, whose grasp of the character he is playing is so thorough that he launches into improv before the movie’s end, to hilarious effect. 

This movie will be released in US movie theaters on August 25th 

 

 

Review: Janet Prolman

Janet Prolman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where her mother nicknamed her “my little queer.” She has also lived in North Carolina and New York. A lover of short stories, theater, music, and performance, she knows the lyrics to almost every song or advertising jingle she’s ever heard. Now on Cape Cod, she enjoys kayaking and frequenting Provincetown.