Below Her Mouth (2017)

April Mullen's Below Her Mouth arrived in 2017 with an all-female production crew, a Toronto setting, and a commitment to the erotic drama that borders on the monastic. Jasmine, a fashion designer engaged to a man named Rile, meets Dallas, a roofer, and the ensuing affair consumes the running time with a determination that leaves room for very little else. The same-sex relationship is not a subplot or a gesture. It is the architecture of the entire enterprise.

The film's cultural positioning rewards careful cataloguing. The representation is structural: an androgynous queer lead in Erika Linder, a predominantly female cast, a lesbian bar, a closeted protagonist working through her own identity in real time. A woman directed it, women crewed it, and the camera regards female desire with a sincerity that critics struggled to separate from exploitation. The Los Angeles Times called it exploitative territory, a verdict that says more about the reviewer's discomfort than the film's intentions. Beyond that, the ledger sits empty. The cast is uniformly white and the screenplay never glances at race. Nobody in this film worries about money, the climate, or a diagnosis. Nobody is revising a history book. The whole thing is bodies in rooms, and it knows it.

Below Her Mouth is not trying to instruct anyone, which distinguishes it from a great deal of its contemporaries. It wants to make you uncomfortable in your seat, and it succeeds at that narrow goal with some efficiency. The critics were unkind, the Rotten Tomatoes consensus withering, and the film endures anyway, a small monument to a specific and unapologetic cinematic appetite.