Straight Up

STRAIGHT UP   ***

James Sweeney

2019

IDEA:  Refusing to believe he's gay, 20-something Todd forms a close relationship with a woman named Rory that has him further questioning his sexuality.

BLURB:  Straight Up is like a queered synthesis of Woody Allen’s and Whit Stillman’s verbose intellectual wit and the Hollywood screwball classics that influenced those filmmakers. It’s also its own thing: an unusually smart, perceptive, aesthetically adventurous millennial romcom that marks its own triple-threat creator, James Sweeney, as a serious talent. Employing the Academy ratio, Sweeney immediately establishes a lucid visual grammar, composing in static symmetry for his own character, the obsessive-compulsive Todd, and in more naturalistic handheld for Katie Findlay’s Rory, his soon-to-be maybe-soulmate. Sweeney merges the dual paradigms after the two meet, and finds simple but effective ways to express the growing tensions between them by introducing split-screens and fidgety pans. This fastidious and knowingly mannered style is entirely in line with the affectedly erudite dialogue, delivered by Sweeney and Findlay with a motormouthed rat-a-tat precision to rival Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. All of this can make Straight Up feel stiff and self-regarding, and it does on occasion get lost in its thicket of pop-culture references and arch wordplay. But eventually the authenticity of the emotions cuts through the fussy surface, enabled by the superb, agile work of the two leads. Deviating from the typical romcom couple, they challenge cultural assumptions about the relationship between sexual identity (and sex) and romantic love. Is Todd gay if he’s in love with Rory? Would he be straight if he only enjoyed sex with her? In the uncertainty engendered by these questions, Straight Up exposes just how variable and reductive our identity labels are, and how anxiety-inducing yet liberating it can be to resist them.