If you saw “Barbie,” and are looking for more whimsical feminist blockbusters featuring music by Charli XCX, an immersive choreographed fight scene and a group of pseudo-machismo men doing a dance number, “Bottoms” is waiting for you.
Following her unexpectedly beloved NYU short film and expanded upon, “Shiva Baby” (2020), Emma Seligman reteams up with Rachel Sennott (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) and together they wrote this big-hitter teen comedy for the girls and the gays.
The new film “Bottoms’' follows two lesbian high schoolers, Sennott and “The Bear’s” Ayo Edibiri, at the bottom of the social sphere, using the titular term cleverly as it is also a double entendre in the LGTBQ+ vernacular when they decide to create a female fight club to try to get girls. Tonally, Seligman and Sennott strike a precise balance to their comedy. The film is camp (a la “Drop Dead Gorgeous” “Bring It On” and “Hot Fuzz”) where the writers invite the audience to suspend their disbelief and lean into this new absurd alternate universe. Still, it is played with absolute sincerity which makes for an effectively moving second half.
When asked how she could intuit that the actors hired for this film would understand the film’s tone, Seligman said that she trusted her casting director for most of the hiring, but also that she looked for actors who played their characters straight. They deliver the preposterous lines with complete seriousness, a necessary approach for the type of humor. At one point, the school’s dean comes on the speaker and requests “the ugly and untalented gays to come to the principal’s office.” While speaking at a screening at USC, she also said it was important for all the actors to bring a singularity and uniqueness to their characters, releasing them from what would otherwise feel like a stock role. Former football player Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch turns his role as a bored teacher into one of the most memorable characters in the film, due to his heavily improvised one-liners.
The writers also leaned into the raunchy jokes, despite costing them some support from studios and locations. Filming in the more affordable New Orleans, they were up against the conservatism that pervades the South, and in the aforementioned Q&A Seligman spoke about the obstacles she faced in securing their top locations for the project. They resorted to a college gymnasium, an abandoned elementary school and a less popular recreation center: the only spots willing to work with them. It was a shrewd decision to stick to their guns here, though, because the writing delivered, as evidenced by a giggling auditorium of college students at the screening I attended.
Seligman is only 28 years old, but she fears trying too hard to write for a younger generation. So, she and Sennott opted to do away with modern technology and give the time and place some ambiguity, which managed to make it feel eternally relevant. We clock a razor flip phone but also understand that in the early to mid-2000s when that phone was peaking, American cinema did not treat the LGBTQ+ community with the same nonchalance as they are in this film. It is a fantasy to some extent, specifically for the LGBTQ+ community who grew up loving a handful of films that they never got the opportunity to see themselves in.
Seligman and Sennott are righting the wrongs and filling the gap on that missed opportunity without trying too hard to be earnest. She resisted putting too much depth into the script. “Why can’t we just be horny and weird and funny? Why do we have to care?” Seligman said. But she does make us care. Audiences will care about the outcomes of our leads and their new circle of friends. The film makes us care about their friendship. And it makes us care about their school.
It is a romp and goes to very unexpected and extremely violent places. But it is the perfect comedy for today. And it is all the more reason that women need to produce more big-budget films.
You might not have seen this dynamic writing duo coming, but one thing is for sure: Rachel Sennott and Emma Seligman have a lot more up their sleeves and I don’t think it will be anything we can expect.
“Bottoms” is in theatres now screening across the U.S.