Bottoms: A hilarious, perfect subversion of high-school-movie tropes

The US high-school comedy has always played differently on this side of the Atlantic. Bits of the world are familiar. But the cliques are so much more discrete; the sexual conflicts are so much more intense. And everyone has a car. The conventions feel almost as unreal as those of the western.

Forty years of immersion in the genre will, nonetheless, have prepared cine-literate viewers for Emma Seligman’s asphyxiatingly hilarious exercise in combat feminism. Some American reviewers have seen Bottoms as a send-up of the high-school romp but, in truth, it’s hard to think of many successful entries – from Clueless to Superbad – that didn’t subvert these tropes. None has done so with such indecent relish.

The film falls backwards into its unruly core conceit. PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), surly lesbians at Rockbridge Falls High, are facing up to another year at the bottom of the food chain when, at the local “fair” (still a real thing?), they semi-accidentally rest a fender gently against the star quarterback’s fragile knees. A rumour gets abroad that they have spent the summer in juvenile detention. Seeing an opportunity to exploit infamy for popularity and sexual gain, the duo form a sort of “self-defence” society – they actually imagine it closer to a fight club – that will, purportedly, forward notions of female empowerment. If all goes well the club may also attract the attention of hot cheerleaders. This eventually causes ructions with more sincere members. “I thought this was about sisterhood,” one bellows. “This is the second wave all over again!” Much snorting ensues.

It conveys some sense of the greatly heightened tone to note that the football team wear their uniforms, shoulder pads included, at all times, even when stomping about the school’s corridors. Seligman, here sharing writing duties with Sennott, amusingly finesses those male characters towards traditional, demeaning female stereotypes. Nicholas Galitzine, so good as the rugby star in John Butler’s Handsome Devil, plays Jeff, the delicate quarterback, as a flighty prima donna who, while chaos develops outside his front door, listens weepily to Total Eclipse of the Heart. There is some payback there for years of cinematic sexism.

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Bottoms is, however, all about the women. Stills of Sennott and Edebiri, both deep into their late twenties, give little sense how convincingly the actors grasp the opportunity to drench themselves in teenage apprehension. They know who is being summoned when the speakers blare: “Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office?” PJ reacts to such exclusion by giving into brutal cynicism. Josie is not prepared to fully abandon hope. The comic timing, in even the vaguest exchanges, is a delight to behold. Watch as Edebiri gives no more than a flutter of her eyes to indicate the alpha girls have entered the building. She will be a star for the era if the Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t get to her first. Ruby Cruz makes magic with her supporting role as the school’s bomb expert (like we said ... heightened). There are no weak links.

All are well used in a clattering firestorm of a comedy that combines brutal slapstick – the Three Stooges didn’t punch this hard – with a non-stop racket of beautifully honed, consistently profane one-liners. The action may be positioned firmly within inverted commas, but Seligman, director of the fine Shiva Baby, finds nuance in the emotional bargaining between her two leads. Towards the close, one begins to worry we may be moving too deeply into surreal derangement. Against the odds, however, Bottoms manages one last triumphant swivel. Think Mean Girls mashed into Lindsay Anderson’s If ... But with more sublimated high-feminist discourse. Just perfect.