In "Bottoms," a high school comedy that's unabashedly gonzo, outrageous, and sometimes even insanely over-the-top — and actually about something — PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) have been best friends since first grade, but in their senior year at Rock Ridge High they are at the end of their career. They're losers, they're lonely, they're lesbians, and in their eyes, that puts them below the bottom of the food chain. So they do what anyone in their position could do. They decide to form a fight club!
It's inspired (sort of) by Fight Club, though the movie isn't particularly interested in that movie, where the characters engaged in bare-knuckle fights out of a kind of romantic doomsday nihilism, macho and serious In "Bottoms," PJ and Josie, in the time-honored tradition of teen movie leads looking to lose their virginity, are just looking for a way to sleep with the cheerleaders they have crushes on.
Director: Emma Seligman
Writers: Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott
Stars: Nicholas Galitzine, Ayo Edebiri, Dagmara Dominczyk
They build the club around a slanderous and rather ridiculous lie: that they have both spent time on "juvie". Sitting in the gym, with a handful of "normal" girls who have been forced to join the club, they all share stories about the men they have had to defend themselves against (stalkers, kinky stepdads, you name it). And when they get to the fight club part, letting out their aggression, the punches are surprisingly violent. We laugh, but we also think: What is happening here?
What is happening is that the film is getting drunk. Jokes don't just sting, they hurt. "Bottoms" is unlike any high school comedy you've ever seen. It is a satire on victimization, a satire on violence, and a satire on himself. It walks a tightrope between sensibility and madness, and it's full of moments that are defiantly what we used to call wrong.
PJ and Josie walk over to their lockers, which have been spray-painted with numbered scurrilous epithets, and Josie says, "What, I got fagot number 1 this time?" There are jokes about bulimia, rape, suicide and blowing up the school. Some of the antagonists are the Vikings, the high school football team, who never stop wearing their uniforms and function as a deranged parody of the patriarchy – think John Hughes villains played by the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. When Jeff, the most scurvy of them and the boyfriend of Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), whom Josie has feelings for, is caught sleeping with the mother of Hazel (Ruby Cruz), a member of the fight club, the girls visit her house to recuperate. As "Total Eclipse of the Heart" plays on the soundtrack, Hazel plants a bomb in her car and it blows up nicely.
"Bottoms" at times evokes the barbed-wire field of "But I'm a Cheerleader" crossed with the outrageous misanthropy of "Heathers." Unlike those movies, though, this one has a mocking humanity that sneaks up on you. Fight club, spoofing, revenge: PJ and Josie have thrown it all away because their lives don't seem real to them. They need to punch their way to be seen. This is the second feature directed by Emma Seligman, whose first film, “Shiva Baby” (2021), was a critical favorite, even though I found it both over-the-top and unconvincing. "Bottoms" is a bolder, more confident work, partly because Seligman has left realism behind. She has made a vicious gambling comedy that is at once confessional and surreal. It feels like a quintessential SXSW movie, and at its premiere last night it went big.
In the outside world, it can prove to be a more challenging breed of talking point than wild dogs. Yet Seligman, who penned the lurid script with her lead actress Rachel Sennott, is right: the way those forced to see themselves as outsiders project their alienation onto everything around them. surrounds.
Seligman is also projecting. She inflates the high school experience like a toxic balloon. The scenes with the students and her teacher, Mr. G., caught between her empathy and her rage against feminism, are amazingly funny; former NFL star Marshawn Lynch plays him with a mercurial conviction that he keeps delivering. And PJ and Josie aren't just friends with different flavors. They represent a radically different approach to combating prejudice: PJ, the flippant and ruthless leader, content to use her wits as a means of destruction, and Josie, the more insecure and outspoken. Her courtship of Isabel begins with breaking down Isabel's wall of conventionality, and Ayo Edebiri makes us feel every shiver of Josie's desire to connect.
Watch Bottoms 2023 Movie Trailer
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