The unapologetic level of artifice in director Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please—from the ’50s set design, costuming, and Beat-inspired dialogue, down to the slinky choreography and lurid neon lighting—is at once the source of the film’s considerable pleasures and its limitations. Perfectly calibrated though it is to accentuate the core theme of gender as an encrustation of appearance and ritual, it also seals the film inside a fantasy world rife with the nostalgic escapism that so often trivializes period dramas.
In a Manhattan that never sees so much as a ray of sunlight, perpetually shrouded in a pink or blue glow, Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and her husband, Arthur (Harry Melling), lead a stylishly impoverished bohemian life. When they witness a murder at the hands of the Young Gents, an oversexed greaser gang led by Teddy (Karl Glusman), the encounter sets off a chain reaction that allows Suze to realize her latent machismo and Arthur his desire for Teddy. In the half-light of dream, the couple and the gang circle each other in a dance tinged with sensual menace.
Riseborough suggests nothing so much as a reanimated silent film star, highly physical, down to the erect angle of her cigarette and sneering, apelike caricature of the masculine archetype that her character seeks to emulate. Her foil is Melling, whose Arthur disowns his masculinity and trails after Teddy like a numb limb, baffled by but powerless to resist his fascination. The Young Gents, meanwhile, seem like they’ve strayed, disoriented, from the set of a musical.
In keeping with the film’s noirish sensibility, every line of dialogue in Kramer and Noel David Taylor’s screenplay oozes not only with street poetics, but winks to queer theory. In certain heightened moments, the actors all but declaim their lines as though at a poetry reading while, on the soundtrack, syncopated drumrolls and double bass play counterpoint.
“I’m like that wheeler wasp, you know? An etiological non-entity,” says Teddy to Arthur in the men’s room of the Blue Angel Club, toying with his switchblade. When Arthur is lost for words, Teddy goes on: “William Wheeler, man, the ethologist. He watched the male wasp for ever and ever and found… nothing. No behavior. I mean it, no way of being at all.” He then mimics a buzzing sound. His use of “etiological” instead of, one assumes, “entomological” may not be the mistake that is seems. Etiology, which is defined as the science of finding causes and origins, turn outs to be quite apropos, as Teddy never knew his father.
In its fetishism—creaking leather, tight blue jeans, biker jackets thrown over the shoulder in slow motion—Please Baby Please is clearly indebted to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. The influence is most apparent in a fantasy sequence with Suze in an officer’s cap at the center of a cadre of pelvic-thrusting greaser lackeys. Homage is one thing, but Kramer strips the sheen of rebelliousness from the source while leaving its avant-gardist provocations untouched. Where Anger’s film critiques even as it indulges in fetishism, Kramer fetishizes originality, reducing it to ornamentation—a set of appearances to be copied—as opposed to a value in itself.
Please Baby Please continues the trend of historical fiction that imports contemporary liberal politics (here, attitudes about gender and sexuality) into bygone eras. Knowing anachronism may be part of the camp, but it smacks of nostalgia for an underground sexuality and cinema, before both were accepted enough, at least in places like Manhattan, to emerge into the open. Seeing the politics of today operate in the past may be comforting, but it threatens to paper over the real historical progress that’s been made since the ’50s. Ironically, it makes today’s politics appear ahistorical, eternal, even natural, in a film that wants no truck with naturalism.
Delightful though it can be, Please Baby Please’s artificiality is claustrophobic. One may wonder if it shies away from contact with the real world because our own times are too complex, too hopeless to face head-on. In succumbing to the temptation to ignore reality in favor of fantasy, the film pats us on the back for an already accomplished rebellion and lulls us into complacency.
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