Tag: Afternoon Delight

Seed & Spark: Agency and ‘Afternoon Delight’

I was lucky enough to listen to Jill Soloway speak recently at a small gathering to discuss a new filmic voice for women, hosted by the genius and innovative Emily Best, CEO of the crowdfunding and distribution platform Seed & Spark. Soloway spoke so eloquently about her process and about women’s opportunities and struggles in the film industry. She was so engrossing and inspiring to listen to that there was a palpable feeling of magic in the room. One of the valuable lessons I took away from our discussion was about her career turning point — from producer to filmmaker — is that she realized that no one else was going to make it happen for her. It makes me wonder how many other women and men are waiting for permission to make their masterpieces, and license to make the characters within them bold, alive, and human.

Juno Temple and Katherine Hahn in Afternoon Delight
Juno Temple and Katherine Hahn in Afternoon Delight

 

This is a guest post by Leah Rudick.

I recently made my first foray into screenwriting.  Very exciting, no?  A few months ago, I started writing a script about a woman in her early 30s who finds herself suddenly living in New York City, wading through the murky waters without direction, a passive observer in a sea of eccentric, cruel and hilarious characters.  A woman searching for her purpose.  Who’s excited?  Did I pique your interest?  Is that a resounding YES?!  I wrote about 40 pages, got stuck, and showed it to my intuitive and brilliant better half who read it, gave me some very generous compliments, and then asked, “Why don’t you give Sarah [my heroine] some agency?  What does she want?  Is there a way for her to be bolder instead of having all of these things happen to her?  A way to let her be the ignition for whatever construction or destruction occurs?  Can we watch her be the cause rather than the reaction?”  They were great questions.  Why was I interested in writing something about a woman who seemed comfortable being so inactive?  Who was satisfied sitting back and observing, judging, but paralyzed from actually stepping in and taking part.

It’s a manifestation of a struggle I’ve always had, the fight against my natural instinct to be the shy, passive observer.  It’s something that my inspired 78-year old acting coach worked tirelessly to drill out of my head: “Leah, what do you want in this scene?  You can’t exist in this gray area.  It’s boring!”  It’s an issue that I notice in many films that I’ve seen and worked on.  The female character is the watcher, the muse, the victim, the object.  And while I have been easily able to detect this trope in the work of others, I was totally oblivious to it in my own work.

When I watched Jill Soloway’s most recent feature, Afternoon Delight, I was, in the truest sense of the word, delighted.  It was everything I wanted in a movie: Hilarious, tragic, deeply moving, beautifully shot with incredibly grounded and brilliant performances across the board.  The story follows stay-at-home mom Rachel (Katherine Hahn) who takes in a young stripper named McKenna (Juno Temple) in an effort to save her and also to distract herself from her own upper middle class malaise.

This is a film about women’s agency, and watching it was an eye opener for me.  The movie is so bold and colorful and also so feminine in a more real way than I think one often sees in film, even sometimes in those made by women.  It is emboldening to watch, because it has been created by the voice of a woman who is seemingly unfettered by the much discussed “male gaze” in filmmaking.

Leah Rudick and Katie Hartman in web series Made to Order
Leah Rudick and Katie Hartman in web series Made to Order

 

I was lucky enough to listen to Jill Soloway speak recently at a small gathering to discuss a new filmic voice for women, hosted by the genius and innovative Emily Best, CEO of the crowdfunding and distribution platform Seed & Spark.  Soloway spoke so eloquently about her process and about women’s opportunities and struggles in the film industry.  She was so engrossing and inspiring to listen to that there was a palpable feeling of magic in the room.  One of the valuable lessons I took away from our discussion was about her career turning point — from producer to filmmaker — is that she realized that no one else was going to make it happen for her. It makes me wonder how many other women and men are waiting for permission to make their masterpieces, and license to make the characters within them bold, alive, and human.

I’m grateful she had the realization, because Afternoon Delight is masterful at defying the norms of the comedy genre in such an incredibly subtle way.  This conversation of agency begs another discussion about which genres best lend themselves to this kind of work.  It is one thing to make an action film with a female lead and make her active and in control and awesome (I am so excited to see the Seed & Spark funded Sheila Scorned, a “grindhouse short starring a quick-witted stripper who’s out to get even with the men in her way” because it looks badass), but what about when the genre is one that typically does not allow for female agency?

I produce a web series with my comedy duo, Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting, called Made To Order about two sisters who start an underground food delivery service.    It is a sort of high octane comedy about two women who forcefully throw themselves into a world they know nothing about at the expense of everything.  With my very brilliant comedy partner, Katie Hartman, it has been thrilling to create two characters who do rather than watch and manage this in a completely unhinged way.

I love the idea of finding more ways to write female characters with agency in every genre, across the board.   This awareness and need for these types of character in creative work has had a profound effect on my own writing and I know that I’m not alone in this sentiment.  When we start allowing characters to do, rather than to simply watch others do, worlds open up and we can actually started having fun.

 

Leah Rudick is an actress, writer and comedian. Film credits include Cut to Black (Brooklyn Film Fest Audience Award), Lost Children (Desperate Comfort Prod., IFP Lab Selection), Bloody Mary (Sci-fi channel), Kids Go to the Woods, Kids Get Dead (Darkstar Entertainment),  Prayer to a Vengeful God (Insurgent Pictures) and Jammed (Runaway Bandit Productions).   She can be seen on the popular web series High Maintenance and on the webby-winning youtube channel Barely Political.  She is a founding member of Lifted Yoke Productions, and is currently in pre-production for their feature dramedy, Sweet Parents.  Their first short film, Blackout, can be streamed at Seed & Spark Cinema.  She is a contributing writer to Reductress.com.  She is half of the sketch comedy duo Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting (Edinburgh Fringe, The PIT, UCBT, NY Fringe Fest) and co-creator/co-star of their upcoming web series Made To Order (madetoorderseries.com).  

‘Afternoon Delight’: Don’t Hang Your Shame on Me

Let’s face it: many of us feminists will pay lip service to sex workers’ rights while at the same time hold within us a mess of conflicting feelings around the subject. In fact, many of us are probably a bit more repressed about sex than we’d care to admit. The idea that there are women who voluntarily seek out such work has long been a feminist conundrum. But perhaps the bigger problem is the paternalistic impulse of feminists trying to rescue sex workers. Jill Soloway, the writer and director of Afternoon Delight knows this all too well. As she says in an interview about the film, “It’s not just about rescue. If you’re into rescue go rescue the garment workers. It’s about amping up your own relationship to your own shame around sex.”

Afternoon Delight movie poster
Afternoon Delight movie poster

 

This is a guest post by Heather Brown. [contains spoilers]

Let’s face it: many of us feminists will pay lip service to sex workers’ rights while at the same time hold within us a mess of conflicting feelings around the subject. In fact, many of us are probably a bit more repressed about sex than we’d care to admit. The idea that there are women who voluntarily seek out such work has long been a feminist conundrum.  But perhaps the bigger problem is the paternalistic impulse of feminists trying to rescue sex workers.  Jill Soloway, the writer and director of Afternoon Delight, knows this all too well.  As she says in an interview about the film, “It’s not just about rescue. If you’re into rescue go rescue the garment workers. It’s about amping up your own relationship to your own shame around sex.”

Here’s the story: a bored woman named Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) lives in a bright, airy Silver Lake, L.A. home with her app-designing husband and toddler.  Rachel doesn’t work but busies herself with event planning and local charities linked to her local Jewish Community Center.  We see her in therapy sessions, spinning her wheels to justify and normalize her ennui (“Six months, no sex…I feel like there are a lot of couples who go through dry spells.” Her therapist, played by a wry Jane Lynch, replies, “Not healthy couples”).  Her best friend, Stephanie (Jessica St. Clair), suggests that Rachel go to a strip club for a change of pace. She says of she and her husband: “We go there, get all hot, and then we bang each other when we get home.” Then, a night out with friends at a strip club finds her face-to-face with a young woman named McKenna (Juno Temple), who delivers Rachel a lap-dance at the behest of her husband. She’s sufficiently discomfited, but her curiosity is awakened.

McKenna (Juno Temple) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn)
McKenna (Juno Temple) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn)

 

It’s Rachel’s curiosity that  leads her back to the neighborhood of the strip club in the sober light of day, where she happens to see McKenna in the midst of one of those breakups where everything you own ends up in the trunk of a car and strewn on the sidewalk. Rachel invites McKenna to stay with her for a few days, and then offers her the long-term gig of being her live-in nanny. Soon, Rachel learns that McKenna is more than a stripper when McKenna reveals matter-of-factly, “I’m a full service sex worker.” This knowledge changes Rachel’s posture toward McKenna, and she tells her, “If you want out of that life, I can help you.”  So it begins: Rachel attempts to take McKenna under her wing, but as the film progresses, we start to wonder exactly who most needs being saved—and all signs point to Rachel.

While the film crescendos with a big “uh-oh” scene, the most compelling moments are those in which women are sharing experiences of raw, ugly honesty. These are instances when shame is pulled back, and we see the guts and blood of their perfectly curated lives. Two scenes are especially haunting (you won’t see these in the trailer).

McKenna puts makeup on Rachel
McKenna puts makeup on Rachel

 

In the first, Rachel accompanies McKenna on a call to one of her clients. This is a man who enjoys having another woman watch him while he is having sex with McKenna, and Rachel tells her she wants to do it.  Rather than giving us just a taste of what happens in a before-and-after editing sequence, Soloway brings us into the room to watch Rachel watch McKenna on the job, as it were. The camera holds the gaze of the client, an overweight middle-aged man with ample body hair, who remains fixed on Rachel as he climaxes with McKenna sitting on top of him.

To me, what’s most troubling is the way that Rachel regards McKenna afterward.  She becomes withholding, and in a symbolic rejection, prevents McKenna from babysitting a large group of her friends’ kids so they can have a ladies’ wine night. Rachel blames McKenna for what she has now learned about herself—which is a dehumanizing act. Yet, Kathryn Hahn imbues such a degree of sympathy to the performance that we can almost forgive her. This brings me to the second scene.

McKenna and Rachel
McKenna and Rachel

 

Ladies’ wine night: as the night begins, women are talking, laughing, over-sharing in ways that are funny and blunt. Soon, the teeth become wine-stained and—yep—out pours Rachel’s shame. When Stephanie reveals that she’s pregnant (no wine for her), Rachel’s first response is that this now means she’s going to be the only one among them with just one child.  Later, as she’s drunker and drunker, Rachel weeps and self-flagellates for never printing out any of the photos of her child (she only has them on the “cloud”).

What I find so amazing about these two scenes (and don’t worry, there’s plenty I didn’t spoil) is that they show how Rachel is so desperate to reveal herself, to be intimately known. But when confronted with someone like McKenna—who is in the business of doing this and lot more—she can’t handle it.

Rachel (Kathryn Hahn)
Rachel (Kathryn Hahn)

 

I was reminded of another film after I saw this one: Elles (2011), in which Juliette Binoche plays a journalist writing a profile of French student prostitutes. She becomes involved in their world to an extent that it complicates her relationship to her bourgeois married, family life.  There seems to be a subgenre of films featuring women who reckon with—or perhaps imagine—the role of the sex worker. While this can make for intriguing and rich storytelling, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we made sex workers the subject, rather than the object.

 

Heather Brown lives in Chicago, Ill., and works as a freelance instructional designer and online writing instructor. She lives for feminism, movies, live music, road trips, and cheese.