Emma Seligman’s 2020 debut feature Shiva Baby was the biggest breath of fresh air in American independent filmmaking since the sun set on mumblecore. Culturally relevant, funny in a really original way, personal without being self-involved, and really sharply-structured, it’s 77 minutes of solid gold. It also set high expectations for her second film, which she co-wrote with, and once again cast in the lead, Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott – expectations they wildly exceed. Bottoms is not only, pound for pound, beat for beat, the funniest film I’ve seen…well, since Shiva Baby; it’s playing at a level of comedy that almost nobody in the industry seems capable of even attempting.
Sennott and Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) star as PJ and Josie, lifelong best friends who are entering their senior year of high school the way many of us do – horny out of their minds and having zero social capital to win the girls of their dreams. Beyond being gay in an unnamed small town stacked with herosexuality, PJ and Josie have no real talents, no real charisma, and aren’t particularly successful at school. Somehow their even-more-clueless friend Hazel (a revelatory Ruby Cruz) gets it into her head that Josie went to juvie over the summer, rumors spread that she and PJ are total badasses, and they parlay that inspiration to start a girls-only fight club. Promoting it as a female self-defense class to raise solidarity, their aims are more aligned with roping in their crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), and see if all the roughhousing gets the hormones pumping. Because in high school, anything might lead to sex.
Of course, in this film, anything might lead to anything. Its relationship with reality lands just a notch or two more grounded than Not Another Teen Movie – the football jocks wear their uniforms and pads every time they’re onscreen, the school keeps its star wrestler in a cage, the cheerleaders’ entire routine is a wet t-shirt contest, a fundraiser is done via panty sale, and the morning announcements are expletive-laden trauma dumps. Its capacity to morph into whatever best suits its point of view and need for expression seems boundless. Oh, and it is not messing around with its violence. After a few requisite notes of hesitation, mostly from their mostly-checked-out faculty sponsor Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), the girls are soon brandishing their bruises and scars as badges of honors in their halls. This escalates into bombings, and inevitably, battles to the death.
Seligman and Sennott perfectly balance this out with a slight need for genuine dramatic development, but unlike the vast majority of such films (looking at you, Joy Ride and No Hard Feelings), don’t suddenly cut the comedy valve off in order to resolve those threads. They achieve those same results by increasing the film’s absurdity in a climax that would be unwieldy if it weren’t so immensely satisfying. The big trick is they use their creative liberation to express PJ and Josie’s turmoil – for outcasts at a sports-driven school, the football team can feel like a monolithic force, for example.
The reality is also supported by Maria Rusche’s cinematography, which emphasizes eye-catching, carefully-arranged blocking over instinctive body movements, orienting the characters physically in the frame to actively tell a story rather than simply capture it. Eunica Jera Lee’s costumes and Nate Jones’ production design is bright and colorful, further placing the film at the edge of reality.
And at the end of the day, the jokes work because they’re funny. They don’t need any license to be ridiculous; their talent does that. The jokes are often incisive and dark, undercutting their protagonists’ authority as much as anyone else’s, going for the jugular of teen culture without making a big show of how edgy they’re being. Jokes about school shooters, rape, suicide, and everything else that haunts contemporary teen life roll by along with the expected shots at jocks and homework. It’s all part of the rich tapestry.
