"Please, Baby, Please (2022) fuses a lineage of Classic Hollywood and avant-garde inspirations (Sirkian melodramas, the Marlon Brando-starring The Wild Ones , and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising ) into a rabid, musical thrashing of gender norms. After an identity-altering run-in with a sexy, leather-clad street gang, buttoned-up hetero couple Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough) shed their rigid notions of gender and throw caution to the wind."
"Not only does Sissy interact with her audience (which because of COVID restrictions, was not actually there), but she's haunted by a physical presence beyond the cameras of the only world that's real to her-the fictional set.. Kramer's prior work in theater means she knows how a theatrical space operates, and positions the viewer both inside and outside of Toonkel's exuberant, deliberately manufactured creation."
Amanda Kramer's films rely on high-register production designers Grace Surnow, Liz Toonkel, and Bette Adams to realize ecstatic, eclectic visual worlds. Please, Baby, Please (2022) fuses Classic Hollywood melodrama and avant-garde touchstones into a musical thrashing of gender norms. After an identity-altering run-in with a leather-clad street gang, Arthur and Suze shed rigid gender notions. Bette Adams's smooth surfaces and "perfect messes" abstract the real world and function as weapons to "scrap the world we live in." Sissy performs to an absent audience while haunted by a presence beyond the cameras, and Toonkel's manufactured theatricality makes performative Americana both sincere and suspect.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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