This review by Theda Hammels Stress positions was originally published as part of our 2024 Sundance coverage.
The two narrators in Theda Hammel’s debut film Stress positions Each of them speaks with the syntax of literary fiction. No one has told them that they are in a farce.
Whether literally or figuratively, everyone in this film is better at writing than at living. Or maybe we’re now much better at writing or storytelling or narrative than we are at living. Or maybe it’s absurd to make generalizations about our entire world based on a handful of toxic queers in Brooklyn.
Stress positions is about Terry Goon (John Early), a washed-up gay partygoer who was left by his wealthy older husband for an even younger man. It’s also about Terry’s 19-year-old Moroccan-American nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), who is a model and lives in Terry’s (his husband’s) dilapidated brownstone because he is “badly injured.” (He has a broken leg.) And finally, it’s about Karla (Hammel), a bisexual (self-identifying lesbian) trans woman in a relationship with a cisgender lesbian (Amy Zimmer) who has written a successful book about her gender transition.
The film is framed by Karla’s narration, but it is from Bahlul that we hear most. He goes from being a model to a writer and we hear snippets of his life story, which he writes down in a small notebook. Is your life so interesting? Karla asks questions before telling Bahlul that fiction means freedom.
Is transsexuality a kind of fiction? Does that make it untrue? “I wanted to kill myself and that helped me in some way,” Karla says, with the sarcastic tone that she uses to deliver many of the film’s best one-liners. What kind of escape can reinventing transition offer? What won’t it achieve?
For a film that’s hilarious from start to finish, there’s a lot of thematic density here. The satire about ignorant, privileged Brooklynites is there for a laugh, but beneath those (well-made) simple jokes lies something grander about the divide between people. And not just because the film is set in the summer of 2020.
Bahlul’s (white) mother raised him to believe his Uncle Terry was evil. It’s fascinating to watch him discover that the truth is far less grand and far more pathetic—but perhaps just as sinister. If being queer gives us neither a unique immorality nor a unique moral superiority—if these are just stories that people tell about us and that we tell ourselves—then where do we stand? To abandon fictions is to confront the particulars of our feelings and failures, to confront the feelings and failures of the world around us.
For the characters in Stress positionsthe fiction of queerness (and even the fiction of nonfiction) are attempts to keep the world theoretical. Karla’s story is that she is a lesbian – even if she lusts after almost every eligible boy she meets. How one labels one’s own sexuality is irrelevant. But some of Karla’s self-narratives are not so harmless.
Ultimately, the way these characters interact with the world and her The world is as performative as Terry disinfecting his food deliveries, believing it will protect him, but many of our greatest fictions are ones we ourselves believe to be fact.
Don’t let my reasoning mislead you. Again, this is a very funny film. Most American farces following old Hollywood are an imitation of that era. It’s exciting to see a film that understands what made the comedy in those films work and discovers something entirely its own in the process. The privileged Brooklyn setting might remind people of mumblecore and its offshoots, but this film is much broader and much smarter than that. If anything, it’s reminiscent of early Almodòvar, filtering the genre through a new lens.
Since I saw Theda Hammel in her production of Wallace Shawn’s Marie and Bruceit was clear that she would approach the journey of being a “trans artist” in her own unique way. This film does not disappoint. It is clearly the work of a trans writer, a writer/director/actress/composer who understands that it is just as important to take formal risks as it is to entertain.
Fiction may mean freedom, but not all fiction is free. Stress positions is free.
Stress positions is now streaming on Hulu.
