"Afternoon Delight"

Author's note: This review was written three years before director Joey Soloway came out as non-binary and genderqueer. Out of respect, the first paragraph has been modified in accordance with their desire to be referred to by gender-neutral pronouns.

Additional note: It has been brought to my attention that the director's first name is now Joey. I have made additional modifications to reflect this.

Depicting the social contradictions of middle-class suburban life is something of a national pastime in American cinema, as famously demonstrated by Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and much of Todd Solondz’s career. In that respect, Afternoon Delight is not particularly original. What makes it somewhat refreshing – and separates it from the main flaws of American Beauty and Donnie Darko – is the consistent compassion writer-director Joey Soloway has for their main characters.

On paper, the premise sounds ripe for cliché and convention: A bored, sexually frustrated Jewish housewife meets a young stripper whom she takes under her wing, ostensibly out of kindness but with the underlying hope that it will help her spice up her marriage and escape the dreariness of attending meetings with irritating fellow Jewish housewives and putting up with their vanity and falseness.

While some supporting characters, such as ringleader Jennie (Michaela Watkins) remain firmly two-dimensional at best, the film’s strength lies in the complicated relationship between protagonist Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and stripper McKenna (Juno Temple). They meet when Rachel’s best friend Stephanie (Jessica St. Clair) takes her to a strip club, where McKenna gives Rachel a private lap-dance. Troubled by her youth and sexual confidence, Rachel meets her again in the street the following week, and they become friends. When McKenna finds herself homeless following an incident with a borrowed car, Rachel allows her to stay in the house, much to the chagrin of her husband Jeff (Josh Radnor).

Over the course of these events, Rachel has learned that McKenna never knew her father, is 55 days sober and, to top it all, an independent prostitute. What shocks and frightens her best friend and husband also frightens her, yet it also gives her further purpose in interacting with her. “I want to help her out”, she tells herself and her husband, despite McKenna giving no sign that she takes anything but joy and satisfaction out of her job. In spite of their friendship, Rachel hides McKenna’s true profession by claiming to her friends that she’s her 5 year-old son’s new nanny. Inevitably, she trips over it when the wives suggest McKenna look after their daughters during a trip. Despite trusting her with babysitting their son, the couple makes an excuse to get someone else to do it instead. But none of these mixed signals of rejection and affection appear to faze McKenna. She acknowledges them but does not voice any complaints to Rachel.

The ambiguity of the two women’s interactions reaches a peak point when McKenna offers an exhausted Rachel a foot massage that escalates to her thighs and chest. While McKenna’s intentions are clearly innocuous, Rachel experiences the massage with such frightening sensuality that she ends it by suddenly rising, pushing McKenna to the side and getting on top of her – to hit her or have sex with her? The tension remains unquestioned as Rachel just sits down on the edge of her bed and McKenna leaves. It is then comically exacerbated when Rachel calls Jeff from his work and the two proceed to have their first quasi-satisfying sexual experience in six months. McKenna’s presence has officially begun to affect their life.

From this point on, the film’s screenplay could take an easy way and teach its characters a lesson about how the pitied prostitute leads a more fulfilling and happier life than the respectable suburbanites. Mercifully, it chooses instead to stay focused on Rachel’s self-searching quest for happiness. After a day spent at a boring children’s party with her “friends”, during which Jeff escapes to go surfing with the other husbands, Rachel decides to accompany McKenna to meet one of her clients and watch them have sex. What follows is one of the film’s most emotionally complex sequences, confronting Rachel to both her prejudices about sex work and her own sexual insecurities and desires.

The sight of McKenna’s client – an ageing overweight man – would likely provoke discomfort if not outright disgust, as he is old enough to be McKenna’s father and one would easily be quick to label him a dirty old pervert. Any possible feelings of disgust are instantly challenged by the friendly and polite rapport that is established between himself and McKenna; they interact in the same way a physical therapist might interact with a long-time patient at his home. He greets the two women with respect, offers them a drink and demonstrates great sensitivity to Rachel’s nervousness and uneasiness. He assures her that she is perfectly free to leave should the situation prove too much for her.

In the bedroom, the tryst begins with McKenna performing fellatio on the man. Rachel initially interrupts the proceeding with nervous falsely-casual small talk, then forces herself to silence. Kathryn Hahn’s performance in this scene is the key to its power. Her face is a mask of confused emotions throughout the entire session. Apart from McKenna’s body, which we crucially see relatively little of, everything about the situation should invite disgust and it does to a certain extent. Yet Rachel’s eyes also convey a mixture of fear and arousal, particularly when the sex turns penetrative and the man asks her to hold his hand while he orgasms. For the first time, Rachel is the spectator of sexual intercourse in a way that she has never experienced before, between two people whose relationship is both cordial and commercial. That, more than the sight of a flabby-chested old man having sex with a 24 year-old woman, is what disturbs Rachel the most.

Kathryn Hahn’s rich and impeccably-timed performance is one of the film’s greatest assets. She runs a wide gamut of human emotions – often simultaneously, as the aforementioned scene attests – and never overacts once. This stays consistent even during the film’s climactic alternating montage of husbands’ night and wives’ night. The latter gives an inebriated Rachel the chance to both finally vent her repressed distaste for her friends’ habits and lament her ruined dream of becoming a war journalist due to an abortion in college that concurrently ended her pregnancy, her college education and her years of promiscuity. It’s the kind of scene in which overacting is almost inevitable, but Hahn never goes further than she needs to.

Meanwhile, the husbands are left to smoke pot and play poker. Their evening is troubled when McKenna, having cracked under the pressure of the exhaustion and downed half a bottle of vodka, gets in on the fun. Save an embarrassed Jeff, the husbands are ecstatic at the prospect of a sexy young woman joining their party. Pretty soon, they’re all dancing to the music they record in their spare time. Their enthusiasm soon turns to discomfort, however, as McKenna dances more and more seductively until she’s back at doing what she does best – stripping erotically. The men are made uncomfortable by behaviour that should normally arouse them. By being in control of her own sexuality and asserting its power over them on her own terms, McKenna challenges the husbands’ masculinity.

Both scenes involve the main characters upsetting their respective parties by making their fellow guests increasingly uncomfortable with their frankness. It’s a fairly common trope in suburban dramas, but whose treatment deftly avoids cliché thanks to the actresses’ performances and cinematographer Jim Frohna’s superb camerawork. Both scenes are filmed in close shots that pan across the characters’ faces and bodies and long focal lenses that blur much of the background. Most importantly, the camera never gets too lost in the scene’s rhythm and the temptation to show off too much of the actors’ skills for their own sake is not obeyed. The audience is pulled away or cut away just in time so that the essential is not lost.

Long focal lens shots and close framing constitute many of the film’s most important scenes. These include the previously discussed scenes but its first important occurrence is in the lap-dance scene where Rachel and McKenna first meet. When it’s not focused on McKenna’s face or butt, the camera is guided by her seductive dance moves towards Rachel, making the atmosphere as intimate and disquieting as many first-time sexual experiences tend to be.

After the alternating montage culminates dramatically, the film begins to lose water and fall back into familiar formula territory: McKenna leaves the house and Rachel is excommunicated from her group of so-called friends. Her marriage with Jeff appears to crumble as he decides to leave the house as well, and her psychiatrist (Jane Lynch, giving a decent performance in a superficial role), after spending most of their sessions citing her own relationship with her female partner as an example, ends up crying in her arms about their own recent breakup. This is the weakest, most predictable and conventional part of the film, where Rachel has to face the decisions of her actions and learn from the film’s events lest she never find happiness. One can almost see the words “Dark Night Of The Soul” pasted on the screen after being ripped from Blake Snyder’s wretched Save The Cat! book.

Yet the ending itself is not without its strengths. It seems the screenplay itself is aware that the crux of what it had to say about people has been said. There isn’t anything inherently new in its exposure of the inner crises that result from the contradiction between finding and being one’s self and wanting to please people. Yet it draws its value by investing itself in its characters, not as representatives of talking points but as full and complete human beings. That Kathryn Hahn was not even considered by the Academy as a potential nominee for Best Actress in a Leading Role says much about its member’s lack of touch with humanity. Her portrayal of Rachel ranks as one of the most authentic human beings put to the big screen in 2013.

Much commendation must also be given to Juno Temple, a bold and versatile actress who never ceases to surprise and excite. First noticed as a gutsy British sexpot in Gregg Araki’s 2010 apocalyptic sex comedy “Kaboom”, she often plays women with a very open and strong sexuality but never reduces them to just that and always gives each one a distinct soul. If any recognition for exceptional actors remains, she should be a major star by the end of the decade. Her casual, almost innocent sex appeal, recalls Shirley MacLaine’s titular performance in Billy Wilder’s “Irma La Douce”. But McKenna goes beyond the enduring hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype. No matter how tempting it may be to further reinforce the story’s point, she is not idealized or held up as an example. She may be more free-spirited, more comfortable with her sexuality and less concerned about what other people think of her than Rachel, Jeff or their friends, but she has problems and flaws of her own. She may have been, as Rachel put it, “a bomb in their family” but she had to happen in order for their plights to be exposed. While a less decisive ending in the manner of “Un Air De Famille” would have been preferable, sitting through the final act is made worth it by the film’s final, beautiful scene: A reunited Rachel and Jeff, having talked things through and decided to give their marriage a second chance, make real tender love for the first time in a long time, culminating in Rachel crying tears of joy and pleasure as she orgasms before the credits roll. That final image embodies both the film and Kathryn Hahn’s performance throughout it: An uneven but tremendously satisfying rollercoaster of confused emotions.