Please Baby Please
Directed by Amanda Kramer
Hosted by Director and Writer, Amanda Kramer, Actor, Mathew D'Elia and Editor, Benjamin Shearn.
Official selection
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022
Producer
Gul Karakiz, Rob Paris
Writer
Amanda Kramer
Cast
Cole Escola, Karl Glusman, Harry Melling, Demi Moore, Andrea Riseborough
Cinematographer
Patrick Meade Jones
Composer
Giulio Carmassi, Bryan Scary
Editor
Benjamin Shearn
contact
Please Baby Please
«Brillante ironiste, Kramer disloque de façon spectaculaire l’axe sexe/genre/désir»- Olivier Thibodeau, PANORAMA-CINÉMA
“Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar... an ebullient, campy thrill ride”- Olivier Thibodeau, PANORAMA-CINÉMA
In a phantasmagoric version of the early ’60s, newlyweds Suze (Andrea Riseborough, MANDY) and Arthur (Harry Melling, THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT) form a picture-perfect, Lower East Side beatnik couple. Proud bohemians, they go through life with the certainty of their convictions, until they notice a grisly murder at the rugged hands of the Young Gents, a leather-clad gang of greasers that terrorize the neighbourhood with their pocket knives and gender-non-conforming ways. This encounter ignites latent emotions and unresolved conflicts in the couple’s dynamic, further encouraging Suze and Arthur—who earlier asked his guests as much as himself, “What is a man, anyway?”—to question their sexuality and relationship to one another.
Also starring Karl Glusman (NEON DEMON), and Demi Moore (GHOST) as a mysterious high-maintenance upstairs neighbour, PLEASE, BABY PLEASE shows a marked leap in Amanda Kramer’s gender-bending cinema. Complementing GIVE ME PITY! (also of this year’s edition) and its skewering of performative ’70s variety shows, PLEASE, BABY PLEASE unfolds like a welcome update on the queer worlds of James Bidgood (PINK NARCISSUS), Kenneth Anger (SCORPIO RISING) and John Waters (CRY-BABY). Yet Kramer’s layering of artifice and shattering of societal norms is her own: rhythmic, choreographed, and carefully written—as if for the stage. The deep blues and pinks of theatrical lighting mesmerize, costumes pop off the screen, and angular sets confound in their artificiality, delineating the boundaries of a world destined to collapse under its own limitations. Such is the target of Kramer’s playful subversion. – Ariel Esteban Cayer
Showings
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