Stress Positions
Written and directed by Theda Hammel
Starring John Early, Qaher Harhash, Theda Hammel
Runtime: 95 minutes
Unrated
Now playing in select theatres

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

In Stress Positions, beauty is a way of questioning the world. The world in this particular case is the mid-pandemic reality, one of the ultra-mundane. A deteriorating nothingness creeps through the periphery: loss of jobs, benefits, homes, codependents. As it stands, our loser-hero Terry (John Early) is squatting at his soon-to-be ex-husband’s “party house”, caring for a nephew who’s nursing a broken leg. The nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), is a teenage model (soon-to-be 20), and thus a disruptive force out of sheer mystique. As much as Terry tries to keep Bahlul isolated, disaster is inevitable. But everything’s falling apart no matter what; it’s all a matter of attention.

If you went outside or online, you’re likely to have seen messages to the effect of “we’re all in this together”—but the assertion that one’s suffering is quotidian is nothing but numbing. There needs to be something else to grab our attention, a shared alternative to our shared suffering. We must have an image that is desirable. So it is not enough that Stress Positions is observational in presentation, composing around window sills and door frames and staircases. What’s important is that there is always something we do not see fully, beckoning us through the portal. Obstructions of our attention’s object can enter the open foreground. There is no such thing as a single story or a stable curated image.

The nature of shared life is a collision course. Terry is the closest we get to a central protagonist because he is the only one contesting this reality. Sometimes honourably: vigorously applying sanitizing spray to his tip for the delivery driver, shouting “Mask!” at the threat of a guest’s entrance. Sometimes it’s just obstinance for obstinance’s sake, as with the divorce papers left lying unsigned atop a party house cabinet.

And no matter the intention, it is willfulness’ magnitude that leads to equal and opposite pratfalls. Slipping on a stray piece of raw chicken—again, thrown down and promptly ignored—gets Terry’s back thrown out and the narrative is completely out of his control.

Like uncle, like nephew. Stress Positions tightens the tragedy/farce procession; its eeriness is produced with the same flourish as its raucousness. This is apparent from the first moment, when Terry’s friend Karla (writer/director/editor/composer (!!) Theda Hammel) introduces us to the players and setting. While she speaks, we are dead close to a parallel parking space. At first it is empty. Then, as the shot continues, two cars populate the frame. Karla’s speech is an act of conjuring. Still, we stare at the space in between. Karla’s words thread the needle. We mustn’t forget that storytelling is a magical feat. If she cannot see Terry and “Bah-lul”—the two syllables meted carefully as a cup and saucer—then she can at least bring them to us. Hammel’s fairytale narration is just ironic for now, prodding at friend group drama’s ineffability. Nonetheless, mundanity and its complications prod us.

Karla is some sort of physiotherapist (the title of trained professional is all she mentions) and thus able to wedge her way into proximity following Terry’s fall. This isn’t her story either, though. There has already been a handoff within the narration track from her voice to Bahlul’s. All he’s able to do in bed is write, reflect, remember.

As Terry et al talk to and about Bahlul they refer to him scandalously, a Middle Eastern boy model kept under lock and key. Never mind that Morocco is not in the Middle East—now everyone has to look up Youtube geography explainers—and nevermind that Bahlul has only ever felt himself as from New Jersey. His ethnic history is too foreclosed to him, in fact. It is his mother who holds fast to her Muslim identity, hoping to resist an incipient Americanness. It is she whom Bahlul conjures. In bed, projecting home videos, he sees her at Terry and Leo’s wedding. She is there for a second in a green headscarf and as she turns her head she shimmers. He is staggered. The words we hear sound like a eulogy at first but she’s still a two hours’ drive away, isn’t she; it’s the reverence and the inadequacy in his speech, growing skittish around a singular event. She met her husband upon moving to Morocco: she wanted him to give her an authentic experience. He betrayed her when he had their son be born an American.

Karla’s girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) is surviving isolation by way of a minor debut novel based on Karla’s life. Karla resents this, viewing their cohabitation as due payment for what amounts to biographical plagiarism. We hear no excerpts, but the cover’s pink/blue schism implies a hystericized transition narrative. But this is all hearsay. What matters is that Vanessa believes in writing down reality and that Bahlul does just that, he develops an opposing tenet. Reality is no longer enough. Its documentation is a facile endeavor when human creativity is unlimited. There are moments when Stress Positions is a blank canvas. In response to a shared cigarette the sky is solid blue. The street is beige. Her scarf was green. The night is solid black. There is inhumanity in the aesthetic. Something to be contravened.

Karla and Terry and Bahlul sit on the basement floor together. Karla worships Bahlul’s beauty; and vice versa. She is drunk and pontificating on men. “There are ways out of hell, Bahlul,” she says: you must either love a woman or become one, for she has done both and attests to her survival. Speaking only to us, Bahlul sees himself and sees beyond himself: “At night—in lipstick—in the dark—alone—I saw a possibility.” In lost time, a face without an outline. It cannot be possible that we are experiencing the same thing. But we can see each other, and we can see a way out of this hell.