Please Baby Please
Directed by Amanda Kramer
Running time: 1hr35 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Andrea Riseborough stars in Please Baby Please
“Camp” has been popularised and inevitably devalued as a term in recent years: by the time the Met Gala selected it as their annual theme a few years back, it had become a catch-all byword for general kitsch or quirk or whatever Harry Styles has been doing lately. Hey, language evolves, and I’m not instructing everyone to brush up on their Susan Sontag. But it’s worth recognising and celebrating any new art that holds up the old-school definition and principle of camp, particularly when it does so as gloriously and madly as Please Baby Please, a genderqueer musical that proudly wears its nakedly exposed theatricality on one sleeve, and a sleeve tattoo of influences on the other: a bit of Rainer Werner Fassbinder here, a bit of Kenneth Anger and Dennis Potter there, a lot of John Waters and even a flash of early Pedro Almodóvar in the mix.
But Amanda Kramer’s film isn’t just a cheesily retro grab-bag of reference points, as it fuses an assortment of musical theatre and underground cinema languages for a bracingly contemporary expression of awakened queer desire and expanded gender identity. And all from what initially seems a cute riff on West Side Story — think less Jerome Robbins’ or Steven Spielberg’s expensively glossy staging than Cher’s manic one-woman interpretation — as the film opens on the Young Gents, a gaggle of leather-sheathed greasers in an approximation of midcentury Manhattan. They sing, they dance, they brutally murder strangers in the street: we’re already some way from Broadway here.
Innocent bystanders Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) aren’t so much horrified as captivated: in the Gents, so to speak, Arthur sees objects of desire — notably Karl Glusman’s Brando-esque Teddy — he’s never acknowledged before, while Suze sees in Teddy ambiguous possibilities for her gender far beyond her housewifely roleplay. And that’s before Demi Moore (never better cast) enters the scene in leopard print and heels: Please Baby Please understands femme and butch diva-dom alike. Every star here gets to do things they’ve never done before and likely will never do again, but it’s the extraordinary Riseborough (fearlessly poised even when getting her ass literally ironed) who owns proceedings: the base camp, if you will. Seamlessly navigating the shrilly heightened performance requirements of the material, she also gives it a lifeline of tender, bewildered, enthralled humanity as a woman having her whole conception of self and pleasure turned upside-down. Watching this loopy one-off, in the moment, you might feel similarly.
PLEASE BABY PLEASE (2022) Written by Amanda Kramer, Noel David Taylor | Shot by Patrick Meade Jones | Edited by Benjamin Shearn