do not go to Ottomanelli’s. 

The store at 79th & Amsterdam has visible roaches.

You buy meat there and eat there at your peril.

I saw a roach picked out of a sandwich they were about to serve: no kidding.

Go anywhere else….

I should say now: this review or commentary or whatever it is contains ‘spoilers,’ so if you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to know what happens in it, stop reading now.

Okay well my main thought is this:  there’s something very peculiar about the relationship between Boris and Melody. He never touches her, at least when they are courting, and I don’t believe he touches her much even after they’re married.   We never view the slighest indication of sexual attraction on his side.   The camera evidently finds her sexy, because she is filmed in sexy clothes at sexy angles, but Boris doesn’t go near her, doesn’t eye her, and never says anything warm or affectionate or loving to her.  In their courtship, she is the aggressor.   You might think that the not-very-attractive older man would be the sexual aggressor in this courtship, but nope, it’s she.

We are not once allowed to see him acting sexually with her or touching her or being affectionate, even after they are married. 

Why?

The film appears to have an unconscious  — i.e. implicit  — need to impute all the sexual aggression and drive to the young woman, and none to the old man.

There is, moreover, very little of any emotional complexity between them: he picks her up off the street and, at her urging, brings her home; at her urging, the idea of an attraction between them is vetted.  Before we know it, they are married, and before we get used to that idea, she is attracted to a younger man and leaves Boris.

At no point is there anything like an emotional exchange between them.   They don’t talk about their relationship  — well, that’s okay; but they don’t ever talk, either, about their feelings for one another.   The film is driven by a narrative that appears to exist outside of the characters’ emotions.

Whatever Works: what works, in the film, is age-appropriate mates for the main characters.  Melody’s allegedly conservative southern parents are allowed to end up with unconventional pairings.  Both discover new forms of sexuality, as the mother happens on two younger male lovers, and the father finds a male lover.   But for the two main characters, what “works” is not the unconventional pairing the film begins with but the conventional pairing forced on them by the film’s plot.

Melody’s mother, Marietta, functions to drive the film to this semi-conventional conclusion, because it is she who works to pair Melody with Randy, a young man closer to her age.   The other half of the conventional pairing is activated by the deus-ex-machina of Boris’s attempted suicide: he jumps out the window and lands on the appropriately-middle-aged and reasonably-attractive Helena.   Neither of them is permanently injured, and by the film’s final sequence they are paired.

So the film drives to a conclusion in which threesomes are fine — they “work”  — and a gay coupling is fine — it appears to be working — but the pairing of a much-older man and a much-younger woman does not work.   Melody’s mother, then, serves the scenario by making sure the young woman meets a young man, thus liberating Boris to “jump on” the first suitably-aged woman.

“Whatever works,” then, is not what “works” for the director in his private life: au contraire, the reverse appears to be true.  The film allows threesomes and gay sex, but it will not allow the older man to have the younger woman.

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To clarify:  these comments are not intended to suggest that WW is a “bad” movie or a “good” one,  but just to point out , because I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else, the sexual subtext.

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