Director: Jill Soloway.
Cast: Kathryn Hahn, Juno Temple, Josh Radnor, Jane Lynch.
Certificate: TBA.
Running Time: 95 minutes.
Synopsis: Stay at home mum and wife to app developer, Rachel (Kathryn Hahn), is getting increasingly bored and frustrated with her meaningless life. She decides to spice up her marriage life with a visit to a strip club and soon forms a bond with one of the strippers and invites her to be a live-in nanny.
Welcome to AFTERNOON DELIGHT where the mothers are tired of their lives, compete with other mothers, don’t have sex with their partners and where strippers are predictably fatherless and work as prostitutes on the side.
Stay at home mum Rachel decides to stalk a 19 year-old stripper (Juno Temple) who she only knows through receiving a lapdance from the week before, until she gets attached enough to invite her into her home and life. The reason for this remains unclear throughout the movie – is she in love? Does she need a new project? Is it pure fascination? Or does she just want to help a lost girl get on the right path? It’s impossible to keep a balanced film going when you have a group of women discussing their previous abortions in one scene and then followed with the hilarious Jane Lynch acting inappropriately as a therapist who can’t stop talking about her big lesbian lover.
Josh Radnor and Kathryn Hahn are great as messed up excuses of grownups who can’t live life without escaping reality through sex, drugs, alcohol and the occasional adoption of strippers. The focus of the film is the constant dissatisfaction felt by settled people and how to get out of the rut. It’s difficult to see what is more of a train wreck; is it just the pathetic Rachel or is it the entire film which crashes? The confusion of life and being an adult is something which is easy for an audience to relate to, however the ridiculous circumstances and the way in which every character deals with it fails the film. The faux lesbian tensions between Rachel and stripper McKenna are both predictable and accepted and surely loved by those who get excited by girl-on-girl action.
Few things are more frustrating than being expected to invest one’s time and emotions in a character just to find out that their journey is both unnecessary and goalless. The only charming thing about AFTERNOON DELIGHT is its clear indie tone, which may fool some into thinking that it is in fact a movie worth seeing. There’s nothing delightful about a film which infuriates and provokes with its unlikable characters and stupid scenarios. Some of the social criticisms are relevant, but the misery of the fake happiness which is the curse of our generation is slightly too extreme and painful to watch.
AFTERNOON DELIGHT is part of the ‘Laugh’ category at the LFF this year and will be showing on October the 12th, 14th and 15th. Check out the rest of our LFF coverage here.
