When the Met Gala announced its theme in 2019 as “camp,” there was a lot of talk that aimed to correct the usage of that term. There were numerous SEO-laden articles that got typed out that had some rendition of “Camp – EXPLAINED!” pasted at the top. The Met itself had a page mentioning Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” on its website that was promoting it as supplementary to an art exhibit it was having, but there was no link to where or how one could read that essay. I guess they took it on faith that curious people would go looking for it themselves.
Kyle Turner, in a very insightful Hyperallergic essay, not only questioned the Met Gala’s definition of “Camp,” but questioned whether something like the Met Gala, a mainstream zeitgeisty event for rich, powerful celebrities who are as mainstream and socially accepted as one can be, could even definitionally embody the essence of the term.
Notes Of Camp
“Camp” doesn’t mix wavelengths with everyone and there is a diverse array of it, especially in countercultures of the queer community. As Turner suggests, “Camp is a chimera… As a sensibility, a lens, a form of agency, a political weapon, a tool, a language, or whatever else, it is queer, and originates with outsiders.”
The ‘camp’ used in Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please, a pulpy and stylistic film about a couple, Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling), who witness a murder that affects their relationship, is inherent in its over-the-top performances, its consciously lurid lighting choices and set design, and especially in its free-jazzy narrative looseness.
Kramer mentions, regarding the mannerisms of characters in the film, that she was heavily inspired by the melodramatic tones of 1950s Hollywood cinema. Kramer has praised Quentin Tarantino in interviews before, and the movie can be seen as aiming for the sort of metatextual heights of Pulp Fiction. Likewise, this movie injects modernity into that style, which results in a concoction both interesting and overbearing.
Riseborough Shines
Riseborough’s performance leans into the movie’s energy more than any other actor. The physicality she displays – there are hardly 10 seconds where she’s able to sit still in a single position – does half the talking for her. Crawling, leaning, pointing, scowling, the contortions of her body and limbs as she converses with others is so declamatory that it overshadows anything else happening in the movie.
The film’s ostentatiousness is in-your-face enough from the get-go so as to not give a chance to breathe before it finally settles in and becomes a marriage-on-the-rocks at the crisis of Arthur’s sexual identity. From there, the stylistic oneness of the movie’s aim only starts to get old.
Conclusion
For my part, the respect I have for what the film is going for can’t overcome that it’s simply not my style. The individual elements all speak to parts of cinema that I wished were around more. The lighting choices are not informed by any sort of realism but rather by mood. The melodrama and comedy are strikingly modern and with an edge that cuts its roots in Douglas Sirk and Billy Wilder to something strange and surreal, but these things added together don’t coalesce.
Please Baby Please was released on March 3 for streaming on MUBI.
Watch Please Baby Please
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