Bottoms

Best friends, and self-described “ugly and untalented gays,” PJ and Josie decide to start a high school fight club for girls, all in order to meet hot chicks and lose their virginity. But soon enough, things begin to spiral out of control as the club upends their school’s traditionally misogynistic Football team-led hierarchy, and all while the big game against their most hated, feared, and deadly high school rivals looms.

Starting Rachel Sennott, who was fantastic in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, and Ayo Edebiri, who was fantastic in The Bear, and also in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, as well as Theatre Camp, Bottoms is a gleefully chaotic and ridiculously absurd comedy skewering the classic horny teen sex comedy, first by mixing in a bit of Fight Club, leaning heavily on a style similar to Joseph Kahn’s Detention, and then, instead of starring two loser boys who are desperate to get laid, it’s two loser girls.

Bottoms mocks the transitory reality of high school life, a world where the drama doesn’t always make sense, but it’s life and death, where the weekly game is the most important thing to ever exist, where you can tell outrageous lies about having gone to juvie and everyone will completely believe you because you’re all dumb kids who don’t actually know anything. Bottoms mocks a world where the pampered and narcissistic idiots of the football team strut the halls of the school as its unquestioned kings, all while wearing full pads and uniforms every single day, all day. It mocks a world where rape culture and misogyny is the accepted norm, and the only hope to survive for the teen girls trapped within that world is to submit to the rampant sexualization of the male gaze, and to do it with a smile, no matter how they may otherwise feel.

Bottoms also mocks a world where all of your problems can be solved in one glorious outburst of righteous violence.

Overall, the film is hilarious. It’s having fun, and it doesn’t care. The cast is really great too. The two lead actresses especially are fantastic. I really enjoyed it.

But in amongst all of the unbridled clowning, there is still some cold reality. Mostly, it's kept right below the surface of all the buffoonery, but in one particular stand-out moment, as the club members sit in a circle in the middle of the school’s gym sharing stories of rape, abuse, assault, stalkers, and the frustration of living in a world that just isn’t interested in your pain, Bottoms lays its meaning bare. It’s not a long moment, but it is a powerful reminder of the very real violence young women the same age as these characters experience in real life, violence that is much, much worse than any of the bloody,  bombastic, and burlesqued brawls the film otherwise revels in depicting.

However, for all the fun that Bottoms has at the expense of the classic high school movie, with their casual misogyny and racism and heteronormative assumptions, the ones where the actors are all obviously well into their thirties, the one complaint I might have about the film is that it doesn’t quite connect at the end, it doesn’t quite stick the landing, but to me—and I don’t know if this is true—this felt like the result of someone else’s hand, someone with authority over Director Emma Seligman’s film, someone who saw the film and decided that general audiences just would not be at all interested in a narrative centered on young women being rowdy, lewd, and violent, all in order to discuss the trauma and harm inflicted on teenage girls by society, which is then largely ignored and dismissed by the very same people, at least not for 2 hours, and as a result, we got this perhaps too-truncated 90 minute film.

That having been said, if this is true, it’s maybe the most perfect meta-narrative that this particular film could hope for.