Bottoms Review: A Love Letter to Ugly, Untalented Gays
‘This film feels at once like a hug, a punch in the face and an awkward first kiss’: Olivia O’Neill on Bottoms and the power of queer stories.
Photo by Beatrice Murch via Wikimedia Commons
Emma Seligman’s Bottoms begins with two awkward teen lesbians devising a plan to sleep with their cheerleader crushes, and ends with a bloody fight between a high school football team and a ragtag women’s self defence club. Shake off your scepticism, because the ending couldn’t be more fitting. Emma Seligman’s Bottoms is a love letter to the ugly, untalented gay teenagers of the world.
PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), make clear that their classmates don’t hate them just for being gay. No, as PJ puts it, “everyone hates us for being gay, untalented and ugly”. PJ is certain this is their year to finally have sex with the girls of their dreams: cheerleaders Isabelle (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber). Through a series of lies and misunderstandings, PJ and Josie accidentally start a ‘fight club’ (self defence class) and decide they can use it to get close to their crushes. Edebiri and Sennott play insecure teenagers with a sincerity and pathos that rings a little too true for the ex-teen gays in the audience.
In between scenes of the girls breaking noses and practising tackles, there is a love story - the film gives us love in all its awkward, messy, beautiful forms. Josie and cheerleader Isabelle’s relationship blossoms from strangers to an almost-kiss before Hazel (Ruby Cruz) blows up a football player’s car with a homemade bomb. When they kiss and seal the deal, Edebiri masterfully portrays the multiplelayers of anxiety that come with being a girl who likes girls as well as an awkward teenager. PJ and Josie’s friendship is tested when jocks reveal the truth behind the fight club and send the pair to the bottom of the social ladder once again.
Seligman proves her masterful understanding of teenage girlhood with a montage of PJ and Josie being outcasts set to Avril Lavigne’s ‘Complicated’. We see the rest of the fight club come together for a movie night and comfort Hazel when she’s beaten up by a student wrestler who is kept in a cage (for the school’s safety). Their isolation is captured in a scene of PJ eating spaghetti hoops from a can alone on the bleachers, as Josie kicks a can down the road.
The film ends with the perfect climax - Josie makes up with PJ and leads the charge to save antagonist and footballer Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) from attempted murder-via-pineapple-juice by a rival football team. Despite their anger at being used and lied to, the fight club come together in a glorious scene reminiscent of classic teen movie final football games - until one of them stabs a player through the chest with a sword. An incredible fight follows, concluding with our blood spattered protagonists finally getting to kiss their crushes (on the mouth!).
Bottoms revels in its madness, its violence, its flawed characters, and its lesbians. This film feels at once like a hug, a punch in the face and an awkward first kiss. Coming out of the Picturehouse, I wanted to watch more high school movies to recapture this feeling - but I don’t think there are any quite like Bottoms. There’s something powerful about seeing queer stories that don’t end in misery or death. Hopefully, the success of Bottoms will set a precedent for more ridiculous, hilarious films with lesbians at the forefront, reclaiming the teen movie for gay teenagers everywhere.