Please Baby Please: All the Way, by David Bax

Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please is not a musical (though it does have a great score). But, right from the jump, it sure feels like one. A gang of greasers dance like they stepped out of a particularly sick mutation of West Side Story. And they’re not the last characters to cut a rug. The whole movie occasionally breaks from its narrative for characters to move their bodies. Call it interpretative, call it performance art… But it’s always cinematic, like the forms onscreen are dancing right along with Kramer’s shots and cuts.
So it’s safe to say that Please Baby Please is not an exercise in realism. It’s a period piece, of sorts, but it’s no beholden to the vague fantasy of mid-twentieth century urban squalor it conjures up. With its dark shadows and stagey, brightly colored lights in varyingly warm and chilly hues, it’s like a dreamy pastiche of Roger Corman’s beatnik 1950s. It’s surreal, like Anna Biller’s The Love Witch. But it’s also not like that movie at all. One thing that can be said for sure, it’s all very cool, man.
It’s also all quite sexy. When those capering hoodlums first appear on screen, their gyrations are accompanied by the creak of their leather garments creaking against one another; the evocation of throwback fetish gear is impossible to deny. The campy/sexy costuming continues from there, with mesh shirts, garters and bulging underwear at every turn.
Kink is a fitting arena for a movie so interested in role-playing. When married couple Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) witness a brutal murder on their walk home one evening, it sets off deep and sometimes violent interrogations within and between them about the positions they occupy within each other’s lives, their own and the world at large. Soon, they set off on separate journeys to discover either who they really are or, at least, who they really want to pretend to be.
Please Baby Please effectively separates notions of masculinity and femininity from maleness and femaleness and then mixes them all back up together. What does it mean to be feminine? What does it mean to lust after the masculine? The spectrum of gender inhabitations plays out across a whole panoply of sexes and sexualities. “Confusion” is an oft-used euphemism for gender nonconformity but what Kramer offers is not disorientation. It’s freedom.
As a last note, Please Baby Please would not be nearly as fun, bold and daring as it is without an incredibly talented and, more importantly, incredibly game cast. Riseborough remains unparalleled as a performer, easily in competition for the title of best of her generation. But Melling and other members of the ensemble like Karl Glusman and brief but brilliant turns from the likes of Demi Moore and Cole Escola all rise to the challenge and add their own ingredients to the potent punchbowl.