| Awkward Sex In the City All I know of
living in New York is what I've gleaned from television and movies. From what I can tell,
the city is full of neurotic, twenty-something singles for whom the process of selecting a
mate is a bit like accessorizing—the sale is made based upon compatibility, measured
by how an item properly fits the needs and wants of the shopper. Apparently, this can be a
discombobulating process, especially for the finicky. Both on the small and big screen,
the last decade is populated with fussbudgety first cousins of Seinfeld, the kind of
people who consider intelligence to be deconstructing each moment of their lives as the
end-sum of a formula of genetics, career choices, the foibles of dating, and the
ontological riddles of city life.
Frankly, it makes me a bit tired. I'm from small town America where, for the most part,
we marry who we're supposed to. It's anointed early on, usually a function of the rigid
social stratification of closed communities (The jock marries the cheerleading captain;
the shy nerds pair off at college, the greasers mate after interminable shifts at dead-end
service industry jobs). It's feudal, in a way, though not (often) formalized by dowries
between fathers, but it just sort of works out that way.
Much has been written that the sharpest divide in America is between "Red"
and "Blue" America—roughly equating to the rural and urban sectors. As this
divide has deepened in the last decade, it has shown itself in stories of the search for
love—or to be more exact, the search for a mate. In stories of small-town love,
conflict enters when love sparks outside the normal parameters of fidelity. This usually
involves a shooting star crossing boundaries of race and class, or just the unusual
outsider, like Teena Brandon in Boys Don't Cry. True, class dominates the
upper-class morality tale, which is why Edith Wharton loved to dig up her small-town big
shots and transplant them in the city, but the urban upper-class is a closed community
itself (Or think The Great Gatsby), and thus, the same rules apply.
Yet class isn't as much of an issue with the New York City Twenty-Something
Neurotic—their conflict is too many choices. The freedom and anonymity of the city,
combined with the city's innate ability to cater directly to wants, has created a
generation in which the old standards of dating seem unfunctionally broad. This sort of
intricate parsing is even a part of the conversational anatomy of the New York City
Twenty-Something Neurotic. Indeed, Jessica Stein's first conversation with blind date
Helen is marked by a complex Seinfeldian explanation of the difference between
"goofy-funny," "scary-funny," "tragic-funny," and at least
another dozen derivations of the like. Think of the poster images of these types of films:
Two people holding hands or embracing, dwarfed by skyscrapers, the message being, "In
a town this big, it's a miracle these two found each other."
The star-crossed lovers of this story hold jobs that have to be in competition with the
lasses from "Sex in the City"; Jessica and Helen are, respectively, a copy
editor and an art museum curator. Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) isn't having much luck with
men, and with her brother's recent engagement, she's starting to feel the clock ticking.
Her office is occupied by the stable-but-nosy best friend and an ex-boyfriend Josh, an
editor who enjoys tearing down the work of writers less talented than him. Jessica,
apparently, moved into the apartment vacated by William Forrester upon his death—its
space is at least halved by shelves and boxes of books. She jogs; she does yoga; she wears
dark-rimmed glasses—in other words, she's an uptight urbanite trying to mask her
insecurities with trendiness.
On a whim, she answers a "Women Seeking Women" ad from Helen (Heather
Juergensen), a New-Agey meditation machine with a snarky wit and smorgasbord of men from
whom to choose—like her spiritual crystals, each one fits a particular mood or need.
They meet, and owed much to Helen's encouragement, they spend an enjoyable evening
together, admiring each other's use of words: Helen's determination that the term
"Sexy-Ugly" means Harvey Keitel; Jessica admiring Helen's use of
"marinate" as a verb not involving meat. The rest of the film is the dance
between the two, Helen as an Aphroditian spirit, beguiling mortals with her
irresistibility and wit, and Jessica plays a sort of Psyche role—superior and
beautiful, yet sad and solitary, admired but not loved. Helen's rather healthy sexual
appetite is put on hold while Jessica, true to her nature, works herself into the idea of
being lesbian.
The story and the storytelling has a literary feel in both the best and worst ways. It
brims with snappy lines (As when Jessica tells a computer programmer blind date,
"Computers are numbing and obscuring our humanity," or Helen's despairing
remark, "Who do I have to blow to get some pussy around here?"), and the
direction takes an interest in occupying our attention when the dialogue stops rattling.
The apartments are reflections of their tenants, and the director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
employs a steadicam in intimate moments, such as the Big Talk, lending the film an
immediacy that doesn't come off as overbearing. Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen
also wrote the screenplay, which explains why important plot points are often best
communicated with lips and eyes alone. Heather is doe-eyed with a peculiar nose, dignified
and quick as she responds to Jennifer's swift shifts in mood or action. Essentially, the
movie turns on how Jessica Stein will react to the routine-shattering situations before
her, with Helen (and the audience) cheering for her to bury the square and unleash the
free spirit within. It's an old story, for sure, but Kissing Jessica Stein is also
refreshingly understated: we see only the intimacy necessary to advance the plot or fill
in the characters, and Jessica's "passionate" and "powerful" works of
art are not shown directly—we only witness Helen and Josh's reaction to them. These
are the high points; the low points were probably created in the editing room. The film
betrays its playwriterish feel (It's based on the pair's stage play Lipstick) by
descending into cliched upbeat pop songs and perhaps making a fatal miscue involving a
subplot with the ex-boyfriend. The movie leads the audience a bit too much; it feels like
a short story from a local literary journal: full of talent, but unable to trust it's own
subtleness.
But what separates Kissing Jessica Stein from other sketches of the New York
City Twenty-Something Neurotic is its description of how her incessant situational
deconstruction has rendered her virtually sexless—not that she's scoreless, but she's
almost incapable of sexual pleasure because it can't be broken into parts and reformulated
for maximum stimulation. Helen hints that Jessica may be a bit of a cold fish ("You
never make noise to tell me if you like what I'm doing. That's why I moan when you do
something I like."), and the film draws a connection between her confusion in and
outside bed. Jessica Stein—young, pretty, smart, artistically gifted—has too
many choices, yet in her efforts to narrow them, she's given herself none.
Spoiler Alert!
I'm a bit confused by critics' charges that the movie is strictly formula—the last
twenty minutes really surprised me. Perhaps I just didn't get the ending I was cheering
for. I wanted Jessica to shed her inhibitions, to let her rediscovered passion for art
drive her sexually. It doesn't, and I'm afraid that I found the ending a little contrived.
Jessica and Helen break up but become friends, with Jessica settling for Josh. The film
presents homosexuality as a choice, and for Jessica Stein, it's just another choice she,
true to her neurotic nature, eschews in favor of something more conservative. So I'm left
wondering what she learned from her foray into lesbianism. The lesson seems to be the old
stand-by "relationships thrive by communication," but the ending still rings
dishonest. I would have preferred to see a whole new Jessica Stein, one ready to take
chances, to stand up to the skyscrapers, to face the fact that the joylessness of her
neurotic lifestyle drove away someone she truly loved. Instead, the film lets her off the
hook with this "We're not lovers; we're best friends" line. She reverts back to
her old self, accessorizing herself with an equally neurotic, asexual, insecure schlub
with whom she can live an astoundingly average life. I find it kind of sad, actually. If
Helen can't inject that certain joie de vivre, then who can? |
