Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) sits in her car as soapy dollops of rainbow coloured water from the car wash flow overhead. She fidgets, she moves from seat to seat, she looks out into the distance passing the time. This opening scene for Jill Soloway’s humble and awkward directorial debut, Afternoon Delight, feels as though it could be significant in some way, packed with subtle and unspoken emotion, but exactly what form of significance we are meant to be viewing cannot be completely known until we first of all know Rachel’s deal. By the end, a few things are brought to mind – absolution, agitation leading towards contentment and the ordinary motions of everyday life. Very much what you would expect from this life of inertia in suburbia.
Relationships play a huge focus in this feature – Rachel’s relationship with her husband, her son, with the other mums and, the most contentious and erratic one of all, the relationship between this housewife and stripper-slash-sex worker, McKenna (as played by Juno Temple) who she meets at a strip club with her friends and husband during an attempted night of wild abandon. At the time, Rachel exists in a state of settlement into the world of ladies who lunch, but is far from content with it. She gradually begins to excuse herself from the endless auctions, Groupon lunches and pre-school events in order to focus on McKenna, who she puts up in the family’s spare room, believing she can save her from her shady profession.
Events are initially presented as McKenna being Rachel’s project piece but it naturally ends up being about Rachel herself. The relationship between these two women could have been a whole lot emptier had it been purely about the middle-class parade swooping in to save the day. Instead, the underlying fact that Rachel doesn’t really need to save McKenna, she just needs to feel in control of fixing someone else’s life because she cannot work out the more jarring elements of her own, moves increasingly into focus. Rachel, in a sense, gains a lot from her newfound friendship. She laughs a lot, tries new things, discovers some of them are definitely not for her and learns about a world different to her own.
Ultimately, ‘saving the stripper’ is not really the point here. Soloway, in the honesty of her writing, makes the point through Rachel’s husband Jeff (Josh Radnor), that ‘not everyone gets to be happy’. It’s not so much that she is the fuck up living amongst happy successful adults, but that everyone has their own mess to deal with so battles need to be picked wisely. Ironically, the one who is supposedly, from their point of view, living the most unsavoury lifestyle (that would be McKenna) actually seems the most satisfied of all. Creeping doubts about how comfortable Rachel is with McKenna’s lifestyle and the irreconcilability of the two women’s ideologies make it so that instead of a neat denouement we are left with an escalation to raw and far-reaching consequences.
Soloway, who won the Directing Award at last year’s Sundance for this feature, presents a promising new voice. She is a screenwriter and director who seems to be able to find the heart in very ordinary things and grasps a real understanding of her characters, with all their personal quirks, fears and flaws. Here we have modern day female conversation such as is rarely shown on film. It disarmingly touches upon everything from babies, to abortions, to difficult marriages, and these thoughts unfold in a way that does not necessarily alienate or reserve itself to a niche audience of middle-aged, middle class women. Even if you cannot always relate to her, it’s interesting to observe. In Rachel, Hahn finds the balance of a woman who is sweet, uncertain and misguided, with a (sometimes misplaced) inextinguishable determination. As her first leading role, it feels overdue considering the ease with which she dons a comedic cloak, and has done so in the past. Temple straddles the perfect contrast of an almost angelic and sprightly exterior which exudes hyper-sexual mystique, who seems to everyone quite naive but can pack a dangerous punch harder than anyone.
Afternoon Delight doesn’t set out to be a slick comedy; the humour is often in what you make of it. Admittedly, this means it lacks an immediate spark that could propel it to somewhere a bit more dynamic. Despite its allusion to awareness of being self-centred in the opening scene it can’t quite shake its first world problems attitude and the tone sometimes revels in this more than poking fun at it, with its descent into darker drama a little ill-fitting.This is lack of polish is also, arguably, what makes it so great. With a refreshing view of rough cut real-life and organic plot development, you always feel as though you’re witnessing something new and worth listening to.
Director: Jill Soloway
Writer: Jill Soloway
Stars: Kathryn Hahn, Juno Temple, Josh Radnor
Runtime: 95 min
Country: USA
Film Rating: 
