How do you follow Shiva Baby, a breakthrough comedy of exquisite embarrassment? Bottoms is the answer. Put another way – you don’t follow Shiva Baby, you head off in a different direction. So Emma Seligman, who wrote and directed Shiva Baby, has made a high-school comedy this time around, with Rachel Sennott now as a co-writer and again as her star and Ayo Edebiri drafted in, who you might know from the TV show The Bear. All three were friends together in their New York University days.
Sennott and Edebiri play PJ and Josie, a pair of lesbian best friends who also happen to be very unpopular at school. Not because they’re gay – everyone’s over that – but because they are, in their own words, untalented and ugly. In an attempt to, also in their own words, get to fuck cheerleaders, they hit on the wheeze of running a fight club, self-defence classes for women being particularly apt in the here and now because their school’s football team is about to play a grudge match against long-standing rivals and the on-field violence always spills over.
Things go quite well for a time. The plan works and PJ and Josie find themselves tutoring an enthuastic bunch of young women in the art of smacking each other about, using their time in juvenile detention as all the credentials they need to teach self-defence. No one seems to notice that they have not the first idea about fighting, nor does anyone realise that the juvie story is all made up.
Among the girls are Hazel (Ruby Cruz), who has a penchant for blowing things up, Sylvie (Summer Joy Campbell), who gets hyperventilatingly excited, though she also huffs paint so it might just be that. Annie (Zamani Wilder), the prissy “black Republican”. But most particularly Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), the hot girls that PJ and Josie set the whole fight club up to ensnare in the first place.
As the crunch football game nears, faces get mashed, relationships are formed and broken and ugly facts are brought to light as Seligman, Sennott and co work their way through high-school-comedy tropes and poke fun at the genre as they go.
This is a particularly foul-mouthed movie, with comedy of the inappropriate as its main assault weapon – the principal (Wayne Pére) who refers to PJ and Josie “munching beaver”. The class teacher, Mr G (Marshawn Lynch, improvising all the way and very funny), who flicks through porn mags in class. You recognise the types from other movies but they’ve all been give a hit of meth, or something.
It’s not quite Booksmart or Antarctica or other smart, modern, female-focused high-school comedies but it is broadly in the same territory. Seligman and Sennott also take on subjects like rape and stalking and there’s a subplot about Tim (Miles Fowler), one of the football team players setting out to sabotage the fight club, because he feels threatened now the spotlight is no longer exclusively on the entitled likes of himself and arch jock Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine, last seen playing a gay royal prince in Red, White & Royal Blue – he’s night and day different here).
When it’s not being very funny – especially if you’re a sucker for the inappropriate – it leans towards the earnest, as if teachable moments had suddenly become the aim rather than set-ups and pay-offs. And then, lesson over, it gets back to being funny.
It is straight-up is not as gruesomely, compellingly watchable as Shiva Baby. Rather, it’s a bold if uneasy hybrid, as if either Seligman or Sennott (or both) wanted at some level to move into less comedic, more dramatic territory. What will they – either separately or together – do next?
Bottoms – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
