Forgive me my goofball trespasses there at the start of this review, but Please Baby Please I feel will be the first in the forgiving line because this movie is defiantly, deliciously, not taking anything too serious. Starring the living-legend Riseborough and the spectacular-faced Harry Melling as a coupla soft squares lookin' for hard corners, this movie is like somebody spiked the punchbowl at the poodle-skirt soiree -- it's a beatnik blowout by way of licking psychotropic toad bottoms. It's a lot, buster, and I'm down like brown for the friction of this specific fiction.
This sexed up leather gang of finger-snapping thugs beamed straight from Kenneth Anger's horniest fever-dreams -- including all nine-feet-seven-inches of Karl Glusman, of the genus homoerotica personificata -- go at these strangers with pipes and hootin' hollers, and then they turn to see Suze and Arthur standing there, having very different reactions to the spectacle unfolding before them. Ways which they will each eventually spiral out in the service of. For her part Suze is struck dumb, scared too straight if you will, and she will come to spend the rest of the movie overcompensating for that shock -- trying to be the manly man she wishes she'd been in that moment.
Arthur, on the other hand, finds little animated hearts blinking in his eyeballs as he spies with his littles Glusman's Querelle-ian dreamboat, who's all tipped biker-caps and exposed Adonis belts and too too wet lips. As say we all -- Glusman is the dangerously sensitive, sensitively dangerous glam-boy of our dreams in this, whispery sex on two mile-long stick legs. And none of us, not a one or a whit, would stand a chance once he'd beamed his lasers back in our own direction. Arthur's quest as he accepts it is to get his hands on that mount of man, and ain't nothing coming in his way.
Aaahhhhhhhhhhhh she's electric! And she shoots this already wildly entertaining mid-century phantasmagoria into the stratosphere. That's not to undersell Melling, whose ironically straight man vibes get goofier as the movie struts along and he starts uncovering the femme underneath like a string of silken scarves he's tugging one by one by one out from his chest cavity. He and Riseborough and Glusman make for a stunning and special triangle of lust and violence -- a boot-scuffed love-story of tender hearts pricked by barbed wire and slicked back hair crying ten thousand tears.
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