The Acting Makes This A Decent Watch

wicj

I'm surprised that this doesn't have any reviews yet. It's actually a decent flick, made so by the actors. I get the sense that much of this was a sparse script with occasional dialogue but mostly made up of stage directions like "act as if you are secretly, but not so discretely, attracted to character X." Lesser actors would have been crushed under such pressure. This crew of four, however, handle it ably; even when said stage directions take turn and unlikely turn. I have seen movies and TV shows in the past in which the actors were in a small party setting and trying to pass off random, overlapping conversation as being spontaneous. Often though, these scenes become unwieldy and cartoonish: your brain perceives the deception in the same way it knows that the characters in a video game aren't real. The actors in BookendS seem to adlib their scenes of this nature (which are throughout most of the film) in a convincing way, however. Scenes with two couples talking amongst the four, or in sets of two, seems natural and realistic. That's great acting; it's extemporaneous on cue. Unfortunately, great acting can't carry an entire movie, as witnessed by {insert name of really bad movie with all-star cast here}. In the scriptwriter's defense though, there wasn't much to be done with the subject matter, save go straight up porn. They did what they could with it. We start out with a pair of couples chatting and drinking, then drinking and chatting. There's a revelation from one couple that they are swingers. There is a curious/intrigued/obsessed member of the other couple who can't get off the topic. This goes on for a while. FINALLY, they get to the swinging and swapping that you knew was coming eventually from the description of the movie. Okay. No problems thus far...some suspense as to how they were going to make the leap from friends to lovers, some well-acted party scenes to build up to that point, a plausible transition...okay. Now the director shows us that we are dealing with two very different swinging scenarios: one fast and exhilarating, the other slow and sensuous. Nice. But. Where to go from here. Will it be a days-long orgy with tantalizing sex scenes and maybe a cryptic, tragic, 9-1/2 Weeks type ending? Or, storm over, sex over, friends go on and pretend nothing ever happened? Both of those themes have been played and re-played. We've seen this before, right? Nope. The screenwriters throw us a twist, and, as unlikely as it is, it is welcome. It's something different that allows for more dimensions to the characters than most movies in this genre, indeed even the first two-thirds of this one, would allow. Then, the writers hit you with yet another couple of twists. Here's the rub, though: the subject of the movie is believable, dare I say, desirable. The twists are neither. They comprise the characters saying things uncharacteristic of the characters that we have come to know up to those points of the movie. Suddenly, my brain is saying "cartoon".

To summarize, whilst watching this flick, my mind said: "hmmm, okay, yeah baby!, ummm..., huh?, meh.

score 7/10

wicj 3 August 2020

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5963358/