Stress Positions — Sundance Review — Sucharita Tyagi
I’ve lived in India my whole life. Now that I’m in the US, trying to better understand the culture, people, and politics, I’m so thankful to the Sundance Film Festival for featuring Stress Positions by Theda Hammel.
A perfect little reminder ki jitna baahar se America seems like the best country in the world, fault lines here exist just the same, if not deeper. And the importance of developing a sense of humor about it.
This Theda Hammel film starts with a long close of what seems like an empty plastic bag, on the side of the street, on an unremarkable day. Is it trash? Does it have something important someone misplaced? Or as opposed to what Katy Perry would like you to believe, there really is no deep metaphor there. While one wonders and intellectualizes, the movie introduces you to its protagonists — 4–5 frenemies living in New York City. The time is early 2020, there are no COVID-19 vaccines quite yet, and no one even knows what to make of the pandemic. All take-out food is being de-sanitised, and people aren’t just wearing surgical masks, the ultra-paranoid, of which I was one, are sporting industrial-strength gas masks.
Once the stage is set, Theda, then uses the relationships her characters share with each other, to peel layer after layer of the systems of privilege that made the pandemic experience different for everyone, without actually making the movie ABOUT the pandemic. She’s also IN the movie playing Karla, a trans woman whose cis-girlfriend made her money on a book about Karla life. While Karla grapples with her resentment toward her girlfriend, she meets Bahloul, played by the Palestinian model Qaher Harhash, a 19-year-old with a fractured leg figuring what New York is about. Bahloul is conventionally attractive and straight, giving him a sense of security and languidness knowing the world will not oppose him much, but he is also Muslim, so maybe America won’t be the nicest. Bahloul’s uncle is Karla’s friend Terry, played by an absolutely incredible John Early. Terry is gay and liberal, seemingly kind as he allows Bahloul to live in his basement temporarily. But the fact that he lives in a house left behind by his rich ex-husband, and doesn’t have to worry about rent, gives him ANOTHER sense of security that neither Bahloul nor Karla have. There is also a food delivery guy, Ronald, played by Theda’s co-writer Faheen Ali, who is brown and his literal life is on the line meeting strangers during COVID-19, but he again is a straight man who feels safe on the streets at night and also doesn’t see trans people as anything more than sexual creatures.
This is the New York you see once you move to this country, it is almost a rude shock. Monica, Rachel, Chandler, Joey, and Ross don’t walk around dropping hilarious one-liners, but you will find Pheobes with stories of a parent who sold their blood to buy birthday presents. Theda, who has also scored and edited the film is interested in what makes people different, even as we seemingly exist in the same systems. Just because someone is disadvantaged over another, doesn’t make them better or a martyr to the cause of the larger good. Does everyone need to be an activist? If we don’t display our political beliefs on TikTok, do we even have any?
Nearly all of Theda’s characters in Stress Positions are varying levels of deplorable. The film makes the controversial choice to narrate some characters’ inner monologues through a voice-over, which in any other movie would have felt like a cop-out but works here. An inner voice is all these people have, to keep themselves sane. By verbalizing their deepest-darkest thoughts to themselves, they don’t actually have to share them with the people around because when you’re stuck in a confined space with those close to you, speaking the truth candidly only ever leads to alliances falling apart. If we express disdain or hate for each other, we might have to face the parts of us we dislike within ourselves. Internal monologues are a great way to disassociate, talk to yourself, and feel like a deep thinker. All is well.
One of the most telling scenes of the film has Karla and Terry sitting in Terry’s home, talking with Bahloul about the world. It’s Bahloul’s 20th birthday, meaning he is much younger than both these white people, and before the cake is brought out, a drunken conversation is going on about the Middle East. The scene is designed to highlight the general lack of awareness in Americans and made me nervous, these are conversations I dread having with new folks I meet here. Theda agrees. She sees how many liberals in countries like America think everything culturally wrong with the world is either limited to or stems from the Middle East because much like India, mainstream American news media hardly bothers with anything beyond the sensational. Karla and Terry may be self-obsessed narcissists, but they still are nice people who want to show up for the right protests and support the right causes. But caught between the bull crap of their own day-to-day existence, can only deal with knowing just the bare minimum about the parallel dimension that is the world outside the USA. To them, it’s too complex, too unnecessary. The scene isn’t rousing, it’s not angry, much like the rest of the film, it just is.
After all, how much more mess can you even reckon with, whilst trying to make it in the messiest city in the world?
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Stress Positions is….5–6 scenes Rebecca Wright appears in as Coco, a woman who just lives in the building most of the action unfolds in. A strange creature voyeuristically watching everyone, without saying a word, dressed like a princess, personifying the city really. Decaying but special, welcoming of new people, wary of those already there. Will the pandemic forever change her? Watch and find out.
