Taylor Schilling in The Overnight.
These days, polyamory isn’t just for kooky Bushwick types. Legit Hollywood stars are spicing up their on-screen marriages with ménages. The plot to each of these movies playing at the Tribeca Film Festival is basically one big build up to a group sex scene. (Spoiler alert: now that we’ve said that, even seeing their titles will give away their, uh, climax, so read on at your own risk.) Whether it’s a vanilla foursome or an incestuous threesome you’re looking for, Tribeca has it all.
Dirty Weekend
April 22 at Regal Cinemas Battery Park and April 25 at SVA Theater 2
Neil LaBute’s new film finds Matthew Broderick playing Les Moore, a buttoned-down family man with a stick up his ass. Actually, it turns out he’s had more than that up his butt: during a layover in Albuquerque, he confesses to his coworker Natalie (Alice Eve) that the last time he was there, he got pegged by a woman he met at a club called Zorro. Or at least, he thinks it was a woman (“she might have been a he,” he admits of the night, which was a drunken blur.) Rather than following Alice’s advice and embracing his newfound kinkiness (“The new cure-all,” he says facetiously, “Sodomy!”), he wants to suppress the memory in the interest of his marriage.
The provocateur: Unlike Les, Alice has learned to embrace her kinky side. She nudges him to go back to Zorro — which turns out to be a gay club.
The pitch: Alice thinks Les is a “pussy” for being scared of his feelings and tells him not to “limp along in life, just slithering around with all the other fucking cowards.” Otherwise his pent-up desires will “spill out” and “hurt somebody or a whole lot of somebodies.”
The counterargument: Les thinks Alex has ulterior motives for wanting to go to Zorro: “maybe you just want to hang out with people who are into the same sort of crazy shit that you like.”
The orgy: Les ends up finding the woman he hooked up with. She is indeed a woman – a prostitute, to be exact. But that isn’t the twist: the twist is that Les hooked up with her and her cross-dressing brother (yes, her brother — what’s up with Neil LaBute and incest, anyway?) And all it takes is the brother’s tongue in his ear to make Les do it again.
The Overnight
April 21 at BMCC Tribeca, April 22 at Regal Cinemas Battery Park, April 23 at Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea
If you’ve ever dreamed of seeing Adam Scott or Jason Schwartzman naked, the poolside scenes in which they sport prosthetic penises will give you enough merkin for the jerkin’. Oh, but that’s just the start of the fun in this flick written and directed by Patrick Brice, whose previous film, Creep, was written with mumblecore darling Mark Duplass. Alex (Scott) and his wife Emily (Taylor Schilling) are a staight-laced, stuck-in-a-rut couple who’ve just moved to LA with their son. On the playground they meet Kurt (Schwartzman), a smooth talker who invites them all over to his sprawling home for pizza night with his kid and Godard-esque French wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche). The Seattle transplants try so hard to be as chill and sophisticated as their pot-smoking, multilingual new LA friends that they barely notice as things get full-on Ice Storm.
The provocateur: After showing a very stoned, drunk Alex his paintings of buttholes and trying to lure him into posing for one, Kurt invites everyone into the pool, which sounds good to Alex until he realizes he’ll have to get naked and reveal the miniscule member that is the root of his insecurities. But after Kurt assures him he’s a “stud horse,” Alex throws caution (and his undies) to the wind and learns to say, “I love my dick.”
The pitch: Kurt assures Alex, “It’s okay for you to want to think about other things and in some cases consider doing those things.” Meanwhile, Charlotte takes Emily to the Asian massage parlor where she works and shows her that marriage really does make for happy endings. Emily calls her nuts and Charlotte snaps back, “Try being married for 10 years and then you’ll tell me what’s nuts.”
The counterargument: When Emily senses the night going from a “freewheeling sort of California vibe” to “more of a swinger vibe,” Alex tells her to lighten up. She snaps back, “I don’t really think that this is a box you want to open right now.”
The orgy: After Alex accuses Kurt of trying to seduce his wife, it comes to light that no, it’s Alex that Kurt wants. The couples are about to call it a night when a group hug gets hot and heavy.