Please Baby Please: Less Instruction, More Eruption Please

Rating: C

By Liam Lacey

As a rule, when you see a film starring the chameleonic English actress Andrea Riseborough (The Death of Stalin, Mandy, the Netflix series Bloodlines), you know you’re going to see a memorable performance.

As a 1950-era bohemian housewife turned leather dominatrix in Please Baby Please, Riseborough is, by turns, ethereal and feral. Gussied up like the late singer Amy Winehouse in wingtip eyelashes and bouffant hair, Riseborough yowls and prowls a like a cat in heat, rolling her heavy-lidded eyes and drawing out her New York vowels. What she does is closer to performance art than conventional acting, and Riseborough, who also produced, has given herself a big spotlight.

The film is directed by Amanda Kramer, who co-wrote the script with Noel David Taylor as an anti-realist drama with a distinctly late-night, small theatre vibe. Essentially, it’s less of a drama than a collage of vignettes exploring street gang iconography of masculinity, homosexuality, and violence, with nods to The Wild Ones, West Side Story and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.

We open with a scene of leather-clad gang of five (including one woman with sideburns) who dance, skip, pose and strut through the night streets. Their jackets are emblazoned with their gang name, The Young Gents. Moments later, the gang stops dancing as they encounter a couple, out for the evening. The Gents grab sticks and beat the couple to the ground.

Another couple, Suze (Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling), witness the attack but neither run nor intervene. Arthur makes eye contact with the androgynously handsome gang leader, Teddy (Karl Glusman). Arthur’s eyes drift down to Teddy’s crotch.

Later, when they are back at their Lower East Side pad listening to records with their boho friends, one of them, Ida (Alissa Torres) comments that the milquetoast Arthur has had “his cage rattled.”

“I won’t be terrorized into acting like a savage,” declares Arthur, trying to make his shame sound like a virtue.

In contrast, Suze finds the violence hot. She fantasizes about getting her buttocks burned with a clothing iron by the Young Gents gang. She also wants to be the aggressor, dishing out the pain, as she eventually does.

The script is ambiguous about whether her embrace of violence is about empowerment or debasement. At one point, she declares that “Everyone wants to be Stanley Kowalski,” referring to Marlo Brando’s role as cinema’s best-known rapist in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

Lit in neon blues and pinks in claustrophobic surroundings — with lots of make-up and fitted costumes — the film has a strong stylistic imprint, but it’s clumsy in the writing, both in the lack of narrative momentum and the strained dialogue. Repeatedly, the characters make blunt proclamations: “Men are the executors of history.”

“They instigate. They disrupt. They fuck,” bemoans Suze.

Forays into camp humour are barely better. The puckish Cole Escola (Search Party) plays a mocking gay bar denizen who attempts to help Suze and Arthur with their awakening transitions, and in a separate role as a distraught housewife with flower decals on her eyelids, singing a ballad in a telephone booth.

There’s also a cameo from Demi Moore as a rich housewife who vamps it up in a cheetah print outfit and a mid-somewhere accent, unspooling lines that aim for arch but land as flat-footed: “These are the slums and I’m a slum starlet.”

Please Baby Please has one thing going for it: A chance to watch gifted actors do some daredevil freestyling. In moments, it’s almost enough.

Please Baby Please. Directed by Amanda Kramer. Written by Amanda Kramer and Noel David Taylor. Starring Andrea Riseborough, Harry Melling, Karl Glusman, Demi Moore, and Cole Escola. Available on video on demand from December 2.