A rocky-horror sexual awakening is promised in Amanda Kramer’s initially interesting but ultimately laborious queer reverie of 50s and 60s style, like a theatrical daydream as experienced by Anybodys, from West Side Story. The long dissolve fades and blue-lit nightclub scenes are amusingly Lynchian, as is the very stylish and all-too-brief cameo from Demi Moore as a mysterious and worldly neighbour called Maureen. But the film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.
Andrea Riseborough and Harry Melling play Suze and Arthur, a couple with liberal, bohemian tastes who live in a rough part of town and like going to beatnik poetry clubs. But passionate, slinky Suze is unsatisfied with her milksop husband Arthur; he rejects caveman masculinity and quotes Hamlet: “Man delights not me, no nor woman neither …” (Their apartment has the Shakespearean number 2B.) Then one evening they chance across a gang of murderous delinquents, led by Brandoesque tough guy Teddy (Karl Glusman) and something in his thrillingly criminal muscularity excites Suze and Arthur.
And so the curtain rises on a fantasy floorshow of vamp and camp, showcasing flourishes of sexuality and brutal violence. But where are we heading with it all and what is it telling us that we didn’t know before? Suze and Arthur are already established as – respectively – sexily dominant and wimpily passive and so the big change doesn’t radically subvert what we’ve already been given, and Riseborough’s stagey performance has been over-directed. But there is an amusing scene in which Suze sneaks into a gay soft-porn cinema (about to be raided) showing a surreal black-and-white film of two beefcake guys wrestling in a swimming pool underwater. For a moment, Kramer’s imagination floats free.
• Please Baby Please is available on 31 March on Mubi.
