Annapurna Sriram’s feature debut “Fu*cktoys,” about a sex worker earning a living while undoing a curse, is farce, psychodrama, theological inquiry, softcore, satire, and tragedy, all at the same time. And in an era when nearly everyone has gone digital, it’s been shot on 16mm color film by Cory Fraiman-Lott (another name film buffs should write down), cropped to CinemaScope dimensions, then seemingly pushed in developing so the colors seem to explode. For viewers tired of the metallic beige-ness of streaming series, this movie will hit like dopamine. And, as the title suggests, it is also, in an increasingly neutered cinema landscape, proudly and often graphically sexual, to the point where it could be described as “sticky.”
The film begins with the heroine AP (Sriram, who wrote and directed as well as starring) visiting a medium on a tiny island in a swamp, partaking in a Tarot Card reading. She’s linked to The Fool and told she is bearing a curse that can only be lifted by sacrificing a lamb and paying the medium $1000. AP doesn’t have the money and doesn’t wanna kill anything, but everywhere she goes, she keeps running into mystics who reaffirm the curse and the cost of the cure.
AP’s odyssey through a nonexistent industrial city called Trashtown (an amalgam of Malibu, California, plus various Louisiana cities) fills out her story, showing how hard it is for her to make a living in an underground economy where men hold the purse strings, but also establishing her seemingly indestructible worldview, which is tough and pragmatic but open to the possibility of love and rapture.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen an out-of-nowhere, small-scaled debut that feels as big as this. It’s also been a while since I saw one where every performance was not only 100% professional from but tonally on-point and humming with personality. The chemistry between AP and her friend, defender, and eventual soulmate Danni (Sadie Scott) is palpable throughout—and, by the end, practically mythic in its depth of feeling. And Scott has River Phoenix charisma—quietly powerful and never self-regarding.
As a married client named Robert who jokingly volunteers that he might be gay, and whose relationship with AP and Danni has fatherly overtones, ace character actor Damian Young is touching, sometimes haunting. The bulk of the film is bracketed by encounters with two young, handsome clients who turn out to be more complex and ultimately worse than advertised: Brandon Flynn’s pampered, pretentious actor James Francone (a takedown of James Franco) and Francois Arnaud’s playboy The Mechanic, who lives in house out of a Michael Mann film.
Even minor characters—like the sex party organizer (Tone Tank) who just got a bridge for his teeth and is insecure about how it makes him sound, and the truck driver (Creek Wilson) whose eloquence morphs into sleaze—have been cast with an eye for eccentricity, and given dialogue that establishes them as full human beings. (The truck driver recites the cauldron monologue from “Macbeth,” linking the scene to AP’s fear that she’s cursed.) The finale is so operatically emotional that you might come away wondering how on earth you ended up there. But it makes perfect sense.
The entire movie is perched on the edge of a dreamscape, with multiple scenes occuring in minimally furnished tableaus that could be reproduced for a theatrical stage (one, a sex scene, unfolds as a psychedelic collage of silhouettes, like the opening credits of a James Bond film). Like Tarot Cards, you’re meant to take it seriously but not literally, and interpret it in relation to your own experience—perhaps like cards in a Tarot deck?
Sriram has cited John Waters as a guiding influence, and there are echoes of many others, including Jim Jarmusch, Maya Deren, Sofia Coppola, and the entire French New Wave. But in the end, “Fu*ktoys” is its own thing. By all rights it should establish the writer-director as someone who, if she plays her cards right (ahem), should have a long career, one in which she isn’t competing with anyone but herself.
Billy Wilder once said that in act one of a movie, you trap your protagonist in a tree, in the second act you throw rocks lat him, and in the third act you set the tree on fire. “$POSITIONS” follows that structure exactly. It joins a list of panic attack dramas that includes “After Hours” and Safdie Bros. films like “Uncut Gems” and especially “Good Time”—which, like this movie, centers on a low-rent hustler who’s not as smart as he thinks, but is unfortunately entrusted to care for an adult brother with special needs. Mike Alvarado (Michael Kunicki) is a struggling factory worker who recently lost his mother and is the main caretaker for both his developmentally disabled brother Vinny (Vinny Kress) and, to a lesser extent, his broke, miserable father (Guido Cameli), an addict.
The latter is an important detail. Mike makes a point of telling people that he doesn’t drink or do drugs. But as it turns out, Mike is already an addict and doesn’t (consciously) realize it. His drug of choice is crypto trading, which he does through an app on his phone. The gives real time updates of how much he’s made or lost on his investments, which are couch cushion change by the standards of a CEO but are life and death for our hero. The jangling noise the app makes during updates sounds like a slot machine.
It should be said here that “$POSITIONS” is a comedy, though of the darkest sort. But it’s an odd and sometimes ungainly one, positioned between the Safdie Brothers “Oh, dear God, this can’t possibly get any more stressful” model and something like “Wedding Crashers” or “Bridesmaids,” with gross-out gags galore, including one that should put you off citrus drinks forever. It’s a bit too bro-y for its own good, piling on absurdities to the point of distracting itself from its main points, and giving its men two dimensions and the women just one. The latter are exemplified by Mike’s goofy-innocent girlfriend Charlene, (Kaylyn Carter) who takes Mike up on his suggestion to try an “open relationship” after he strikes it rich (meaning he makes over $20,000 by trading) and impulsively quits his job, and is immediately besieged by would-be suitors while Mike stands around trying not to cry.
“$SPOSITIONS” can’t quite figure out what to do with its premise besides repeat and escalate it — a problem that “Fu*cktoys,” another shambling character study about a poor person on the fringes, doesn’t suffer from. But it’s got a knack for cranking up the tension and miserable hilarity, and it captures something true about life in the United States in the first quarter of the 21st century, in which the second jobs that nearly everyone seems to have to have are called “side hustles,” and a dip in fortune of four figures, or even three, can mean the difference between baseline survival and complete disaster. There’s a secondary, deeper layer having to do with the connection between addiction (exemplified by Mike’s crypto app) and gambling as an abstract concept, and how the economy feeds that sort of impulse, gamifying what used to be ordinary everyday actions and routines like checking your bank balance, and building tiny dopamine hits into every part of every day.
Anna Barishnykov—yes, Mikhail’s daughter—stars in “Idiotka” as Margarita Levlansky, a second generation Russian American and wannabe fashion designer who lives with her brother and parents in a cramped Los Angeles apartment in a Russian neighborhood and fantasizes about fame and wealth. A chance at change arrives when she’s cast in a reality show pretty obviously modeled on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and other competition series, titled Slay, Serve, Survive, mainly on the basis of her personal story and a video of life with her family.
The movie is about the ethical responsibilities (or lack thereof) in unscripted TV and the social media-era urge to treat everything in one’s life as raw material for to be converted to fame and then money. It investigates these notions and others in a too-obvious, at times literal minded way: the show’s producer, the blandly mercenary Nicol (Camila Mendes), presses Margarita to delve deeper into her own family’s history to compensate for the fact that her designs aren’t very strong and neither is her on-camera personality, at least compared to those of her competitors, who reflexively abase and falsify themselves for attention.
We can immediately see where this is going: at some point our heroine is going to have to ask herself whether there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed, as well as whether she’s embracing reality TV’s exploitation machine for her and her family’s economic benefit or if that’s a cover for the fact that she’s bought into a dysfunctional economy and the systems that support it. A game cast can’t quite put this one over the top, though there are acidic bits of observation about the way people in that industry talk about themselves, and to each other.
