Clothed in Pastels, Bleeding with Violence: Fucktoys Film Review
Sadie Scott in Fucktoys.
Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys was my favourite movie I saw during the Calgary International Film Festival. Here’s my obligatory comparison to The Love Witch, where Sriram shares Anna Biller’s affinity for the girly 1960s—built from Pamela Coleman Smith’s tarot, Valley of the Dolls, and go-go boots. Sriram cuts to the heart of hetero-patriarchal capitalism with a mother of pearl knife, wearing fluffy pink lingerie.
The movie starts with AP (Sriram herself as the lead) getting her tarot reading, and the fortune teller informs her that she’s cursed. The teller can exorcise the curse, she just needs a fee of $1000 and a sacrificial lamb. AP sets out on her chariot (a cute moped), to a carefree ’60s bop, while the credits flash over gorgeous 16mm shots of dilapidated industrial buildings and weathered fast food and pawn shop signs. We quickly attend to her money making endeavors, beginning with a john in a wet, spray-painted punk house. Our love interest, Danni (played so cool by Sadie Scott), is in a fist fight for the hell of it (hell yeah), and discusses with AP that they need money too. We then cut to Danni pissing on AP’s john in a grimy tub. Fucktoys continues to follow AP and Danni in their sex work endeavours, fingers crossed the curse doesn’t catch up with them first. AP connects Danni to a john she had lined up so they can make some cash and it quickly ends with Danni smeared with their own blood, pouring down their chin and neck (they have a bloody nose for most of the film's runtime — it's hot). The two go to work at a club where the rich patrons can bitch about their petty family squabbles while rubbing money between the elastics of AP’s garments. She is then fired for nearly hooking up with one of the waiters.
The film’s best scene is when her trusty moped is stolen while AP gets a tanning bed fortune reading. She calls the only person who can help: one of her more faithful johns. They make small talk in his car, he wriggles with the awkwardness of his paternal role, and they have a close call with one of the john’s work colleagues in a convenience store. They end up at the john’s house, where the two heroes have to tiptoe around the john’s wife and kids. Leading to one of the best moments: AP eating a midnight snack with the john’s kid by fridge light.
AP’s income is always dangling in front of her by a fraying thread. Sriram weaves the movie, moment to moment, from pleasure. It's not that every frame is a painting, it's that every frame is a cake, a good perfume, a cute dress, a lamb. Delight infuses Fucktoys from the writing, the lighting, and the title. It’s a queer, girly take on the Gregg Araki road movie. In REVERIE’s interview with Sriram, she said that she wanted her actors to feel hot in their costumes, as a prerequisite to filming—they wouldn’t start shooting until each actor felt hot—and this approach glazes every scene till they glitter. It’s a lacey skipping rope, leading us from innocence to experience.
Even though it's clothed in pastels and sheer fabrics, the movie bleeds with violence. Danni’s own introduction being a bloody, desperate, hysterical fight. Sriram’s own journey, as the film’s Fool (per the tarot), is over once she’s commits violence, entering her into the world of experience, the world of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Fucktoys shows the stakes in each character’s effort to assert their humanity. During a scene in the strip club Sriram works at, a pole dancer blurry and moving in the cotton candy lights, Danni gives a monologue about a serial killer he shared a room in prison with, a scene where Danni muses on the fact that despite the evil he committed, the serial killer was really a nice guy. A scene which ends with Sriram saying “But, he did kill all those girls?”
Danni answers, “Yeah,” and the interaction ends with an itchy silence, and AP excusing herself to her job.
Keep up to date on future Fucktoys screenings on their website.