Please Baby Please: everyone wants to be Stanley Kowalski. Or Johnny Strabler

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome - photos courtesy of Bright Iris Film Co

22Nov 2022 -

An artsy, nerdy couple are returning home to their wrong side of town walk-up, when they witness a leather-clad gang commit a brutal mugging. The couple are terrified, shocked, and more than a little turned on. Small wonder, under the opening credits the gang has roamed the neon-drenched streets in a dance style lifted from West Side Story, with costuming and cinematography referencing Kenneth Anger at his most homoerotic. They occasionally pause their hunt to circle around while two members of the gang slow dance in a tight clinch. The gang's alpha is Karl Glusman (Stonewall) who smoulders in a white mesh t-shirt under his black leather biker jacket. When he discovers the couple watching the beating, he takes the time to caress and adjust his crotch. One of the gang barks, "Go home mothers," before another suggests that, "Maybe they are home."

Not just metaphorically, literally they are home, the mugging happens in front of the entrance to their building. Arthur (Harry Melling) is instantly smitten with Glusman, while Suze (Andrea Riseborough) is aroused by the violence. Their happy marriage is quickly in trouble despite their sincere protestations of love. From there, Please Baby Please gets weirder and deeper, as if David Lynch had written and directed Grease with the help of Pedro Almodovar and Camille Paglia. The setting is the 1950s with fabulous beehives, an incredible period accurate soundtrack, a beat poet, and film noir shadows lit like a seedy strip club. Everyone speaks in epigrams or sentences seemingly lifted from a dry gender studies textbook. Demi Moore appears as a mysterious woman on the tenth floor who applies her smoky voice to the line, "I ought to be famous but I'm just married." 

Everyone is simultaneously sexually fluid and bitterly repressed. And they discuss it endlessly. Arthur explains his reaction to the gang as "I won't be terrorized into violence just because I was born a man," while Suze begins to indulge in fantasy musical numbers that merge BDSM with housework. In terms of plot, narrative coherence, and thematic clarity, Please Baby Please is style over substance. But what mesmerizing style. Glusman is sheer sexual magnetism while Melling dithers and moons. Riseborough however chews the scenery with gusto, and delivers a camp performance for the ages. Alternately demure and intellectual, she turns feral and ferocious, wields a wine bottle as a penis, trashes a bar, and the rage inside either radiates off her skin or explodes out of it. No-one has the ability to express, or perhaps even identify, their true desires, but everyone struggles to. As the beat poet explains, "Everyone wants to be Stanley Kowalski."

The dialogue veers from portentous to hilarious to pretentious, but the visuals are sumptuous and seethe with a violent sensuality. There are extraordinary set pieces: a broken-hearted drag queen festooned with flowers singing off-key in a phone booth, Riseborough being branded with a clothes iron, a hetero pick-up gone wrong becoming a lesbian butch/femme relationship, a Bijou screening black and white vintage porn with a wet sadistic twist, Moore clad in leopard skin and sky-high heels climbing a flight of stairs, and every lingering shot of Glusman exuding hormonal heat. The discussions and plot don't really lead anywhere except to an ironic, shockingly cathartic, happy ending of sorts, but the tackling of gender, roles and sexuality is pertinent if obvious in 2022. Please Baby Please is an extremely queer film in both senses of the word, directly analogous to Gaga exhorting "I was born this way." As one character summarizes, "You can't make a pretty poodle out of a salty dog."