Riffing on West Side Story and Queer Theory, with nods to Fassbinder and Almodovar, Brando and Brecht, writer-director Amanda Kramer’s deluxe quasi-musical Please Baby Please is an alluringly bizarre exercise in overheated melodrama and knowing camp. Featuring a gung-ho central performance by Andrea Riseborough, this unorthodox love story was selected to open the online program at IFFR. Part of a dedicated section on Kramer’s work at the Dutch festival, the film’s arch tone feels tailor-made for cult movie connoisseurs, but a relatively starry cast and timely focus on gender politics could help boost audience interest.
Please Baby Please is one of two Kramer features world premiering at IFFR, the other being Give Me Pity! Though it was filmed in Montana, the setting is a stylised nocturnal fantasy of Fifties New York, a nostalgic fever dream clothed in gaudy neon and smoky jazz. Young beatnik couple Suze (Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) emphatically love each other but feel stifled by their conventional gender roles. Suze secretly craves a more butch, androgynous identity while Arthur firmly rejects his own masculinity and the implied power it confers on him.
One night, the pair witness a brutal assault by a street gang of grease-haired, leather-jacketed, gender-blurring thugs calling themselves the Young Gents. One sexy-dangerous delinquent in particular, Brando-esque beauty Teddy (Karl Glusman), stirs unspoken homoerotic urges in Arthur while pushing Suze to fully explore her private fascination with brute machismo. Gradually drawn into a subterranean demi-monde of drag bars and sleazy nightclubs, Suze starts to daydream erotically charged song-and-dance numbers involving the gang members. Arthur, meanwhile, is forced to confront his desire for Teddy. This leads both to liberation of a kind, but also to lethal violence.
As cinematic inspirations for Please Baby Please, Kramer cites vintage Hollywood melodrama, with all its coded queerness and carefully corseted sexual subtext. But she also credits the lurid Day-Glo remixes of Fifties youth culture created by directors like John Waters and Julien Temple in the Eighties. It comes as an unsettling shock to realise that 2022 is actually further away from Absolute Beginners (1986) and Hairspray (1988) than those films were from the mid-century eras they artfully recreated. In an intriguing tangent, Temple’s notorious flop musical currently seems to be enjoying a mini revival, having resurfaced last year in lightly disguised form in Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical drama The Souvenir Part II.
In a further winking homage to the Eighties, Kramer casts Brat Pack icon Demi Moore in a scene-stealing minor role as Suze’s upstairs neighbour Maureen, an imperious glamazon modelled on old-school Hollywood dames like Jane Russell. With her fancy apartment, fabulous couture and conveniently absent sugar-daddy husband, Maureen represents another kind of performative feminine identity that Suze initially covets but ultimately rejects. Moore gives great diva here, and more of her delirious vamping would have been welcome. Sometimes Moore is more.
Please Baby Please wobbles in places, straying into clunky theatrical artifice that feels more accidental than self-consciously Brechtian. Recurring sermons on oppressive gender norms become a little repetitive, while some acts of violence feel affectless and contrived. But Riseborough’s committed, full-blooded performance mostly excuses any bumps. Sporting wild outfits, killer painted eyebrows and a ripe Noo Yawk accent, the British star shoulders a broad range of duties here, from slinky dance numbers with heavy S&M overtones to channeling Brando’s Stanley Kowalski via guttural, bellowed quotes from A Streetcar Named Desire. Fellow Brit Melling conveys a convincingly puppyish innocence as Arthur, but he is inevitably overshadowed by his high-voltage female co-star. Riseborough’s real-life partner Karim Saleh also plays a small role, as gang leader Gene.
For all its celebration of deviance and decadence, Please Baby Please is ultimately a sweetly romantic fable, chaste about sex and affirmative about love. In pure sensory terms, the film is a consistently seductive package with its neon colour palette, sumptuously retro production designs, kinetic choreography and sparing use of vintage heartbreak ballads. The jazzy score, by Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Scary, is also a crucial element, creating a steady background churn of queasy erotic tension that Kramer uses for maximum dramatic effect.
Director: Amanda Kramer
Screenplay: Amanda Kramer, Noel David Taylor
Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling, Karl Glusman, Demi Moore, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Ryan Simpkins, Dana Ashbrook, Karim Saleh
Producers: Rob Paris, Gul Karakiz, David Silver
Cinematography: Patrick Meade Jones
Editing: Benjamin Shearn
Production design: Bette Adams
Costume design: Ashley Heathcock
Music: Giulio Carmassi, Bryan Scary
Production companies: Rivulet Films (US)
World sales: CAA
Venue: Rotterdam International Film Festival (opening film)
In English
95 minutes
