Episode 59 - 2 In The Bush

2 In The Bush (2018) 

www.imdb.com/title/tt8493776/ - Internet Movie Data Base
www.justwatch.com/us/movie/two-in-the-bush-a-love-story - Where To Stream
https://amzn.to/4gyUySD - Amazon 

Most of the time, I have no problem giving scathing reviews for terrible films because I'm a nobody and none of the people involved in the film will ever hear what I have to say.  But a not insignificant number of films suitable for a *poly* review are little independent films, which means those involved might actually come across one of my reviews.  And, contrary to my internet persona, I don't actually enjoy being mean to people.  I just have really strong opinions on things.  And I'm always especially nervous when I'm specifically asked to review a film.  That very rarely tends to end well.

So I watched this movie that got a bunch of awards and was accepted to a bunch of film festivals, and I'm gonna have to sandwich this review lest y'all think I hated it.  I didn't.  I actually did enjoy the film and I'm going to recommend that anyone interested in polyamorous media check it out.

But I also have a whole lot of criticisms about it, which may not seem very fair, especially given that it's a small indie film and not some shitty blockbuster movie that you expect to be bad.  So, in spite of the following critique, the movie was not a terrible film AND I also enjoyed watching it.  I think I'm just disappointed because it *should* have been better and I'd like to see it made in the hands of people who could do it justice.

2 In The Bush felt like a college film student's thesis project.  I watched it with a partner of mine who is also a former film student like me and also currently works in entertainment as a camera operator, like me, but who also still has a finger in the indie film circles and screenplay writing circles.  To be fair, I was never a good director or screenwriter, so I couldn't make a film even as good as 2 In The Bush if I were to try.  Certainly my own film school projects weren't this good.  My strength lies in the technical mastery of the equipment and making pretty pictures, not in directing, writing, or acting.

But I know when something is well done or not.

So let's start with the good.  First of all, the premise was good.  2 In The Bush is the story of a young woman who loses her girlfriend, her best friend and her apartment all on the same day, and loses her job the next day.  Life is pretty shit for her.  She couch-surfs with a friend of hers while she tries to figure out her life.  She takes a job at a public dungeon and falls for the head dominatrix and also falls for the handyman, and only then learns that both of those people are in a relationship together.  So she tries dating them both.  Drama ensues.

Honestly, I really love the idea of a poly movie that is from the so-called "unicorn's' perspective and does not feature a monogamous het couple opening up for the first time.  And the couple said the right things ... eventually, but I'll get to that.  So in spite of this being a triad, if you're gonna make a movie about a triad, this is the configuration I'd really prefer to see.  Although, I'd also really like more men involved instead of always 2 hot bi *female* babes and the straight dude between them, but one thing at a time, I suppose.

And another good point is the actors who played the best friend, Rosa, and the boyfriend, Ben.  These two actors felt really authentic in their roles and I was drawn into the scenes they were in.  I have a feeling that Rosa's lines were a lot of improv, where she was told where the conversation needed to go but allowed to just be in the moment and say what she would have said in real life in those scenarios, and unlike a lot of improv students, she nailed it.  Ben, too, did not seem to be reciting lines, but having conversations.

Unfortunately, the actor who played the main character, Emily, and the dominatrix, Nikki, along with all the side characters, were ... well, I've seen worse in all my years of theater and college films, but they were both clearly reciting lines.  They did not feel authentic.  Oh, some of the dates that Emily went on during her bad-dating-app montage were pretty believable, but they were on screen for all of 15 seconds and some had only one line so...

The editing was pretty good, but I would expect that given that the director actually makes a living as an editor.  The lighting was also pretty good for the budget.  This movie had the feel of a rom-com, so the lighting should not be noticable as dramatic or amazing.  In a high key, lighthearted film, "good" lighting should be unnoticed by the general audience.  If you notice lighting in a film, it's either really bad, or it's exceptional and almost like its own character.  A rom-com should not have either types of lighting, so I'd say the lighting design was successful.

But the script... whew, that script needed like 15 more revisions before it was put to film.  The script was bad both mechanically in terms of its structure and also bad in terms of its creativity.  Dating fiction writers as I do (how many am I up to now?  Not even sure), and being such an avid consumer of fiction as I am, it's really hard to watch movies with bad scriptwriting.  This was so bad, it kept knocking us out of the movie.  No, that's not true, it knocked us out at the very beginning and failed to ever bring us back in.

The character development was just not there.  One of my major pet peeves about romance movies is that we very frequently are never shown why any two given characters actually like each other.  We are supposed to root for the two protagonists to end up together because they are supposed to, but often either there is not enough character development for us to understand why either one likes the other or the two actively dislike each other as a misguided attempt at manufacturing "conflict" into the film.

In this case, I just didn't understand why any of the characters liked each other.  Nikki, the dominatrix, had no personality whatsoever.  Emily was just a fucking mess (although she really should have been, given her situation).  Ben had the most personality, but his whole relationship progression with Emily was told in a silent date montage so we didn't hear any conversation to find out what they were laughing about or what they found interesting about each other.  And Ben and Nikki are not on screen together until halfway through the film so I don't know why they liked each other either.

Which brings me to my next pet peeve:  when writers don't understand their subjects.  I will give some credit to the writers here in that they clearly did their *research*.  Unlike a certain popular abuse apologism masquerading as BDSM story whose author has never tried any of the things that she writes about, has never spoken to people who are into those things, and so obviously has nothing but contempt for people who do them, the way that polyamory was handled in this film felt to me like the writers really made an effort to meet polyamorists and to try to understand them.  I have no idea if anyone involved in the film is poly themselves, but it felt to me like they were not but made a very good effort to understand and represent us fairly.

That being said, however, it felt to me like they listened to all the stories they heard of all the different experiences that people had, and then ... smooshed them all into one plot?  So, if y'all remember when I reviewed Fling, I talked about how the decisions that some characters make, only make sense if the characters are not really poly but those decisions would be very out of character for people who are in happy, functioning relationships as the start of the movie shows us.  Those kinds of decisions are necessary to move the plot along in the direction that the writer wants the plot to go, but they don't really fit the kinds of decisions that the people we meet in the beginning would make.

That's what this felt like.  I told my partner that I felt we saw 2 different Emilys and 3 different couples.  We saw one Emily at the beginning of the movie and a different Emily during the conflict arc in Act 2, and we saw one couple (of Ben and Nikki) in Act 1, a different couple in Act 2, and yet another couple in Act 3.  It was very jarring.

I have a whole rant about who was "wrong" in each stage of the movie and why they were badly written, and my partner and I angrily talked at each other for like 2 hours after we saw the film, and even woke up the next morning going "and another thing..."  But I'm not actually going to put any of that here.  As I said in the beginning, in spite of my criticisms, I do actually want people to see this movie.  It's just ... not as good as all the awards led me to believe, "good" in the quality sense, not necessarily the enjoyable sense.

There was no real ... "there" there.  There wasn't any substance, no real story in this story.  Nothing really happened.  The characters all fall for each other but not in ways that we, the viewers, can experience along with them since the characters are flat and one-dimensional and the relationships have no real development on-screen.  So we had to manufacture a conflict for the obligatory second act pinnacle confrontation and everyone has a freak out with no real reason for it and no real build up.  It then follows that standard 3-act structure where the protagonist hits a low point and has to rise up to reach the conclusion which ... honestly, kinda pissed me off.

I don't want to spoil the ending too badly, I just wish people would stop writing off solo poly as some kind of "lesser" version that only people with commitment issues have and that once we find "The One", we'll all want the escalator.  Because, frankly, there was nothing fucking wrong with Nikki and Ben's relationship as-is (at least, not that I could tell because we don't actually see their relationship arc but they seem happy and the structure itself isn't inherently unhealthy) so it didn't need to be "fixed" - not for them and not even for Emily.  I'd even argue that the "fix" was a downgrade, a step backwards into a less-healthy dynamic because of how they got there. #Lesbian3rdDateWithUhaulsCliche

I spent the majority of this film complaining about one character making really bad decisions, and then immediately yelling at the other characters and defending the one I just criticised.  It was a whole night of "on this hand ... but on the other hand..."  Like, yeah, that was a bonehead move, but once we establish that this is how it is, NOW the other characters are wrong, and now that we've established that this other character is this way, now the first character is fucking things up again...  It was giving me whiplash.

So, on that note, it wasn't terrible.  I know, I made it sound awful.  Part of my problem is that I spent way too many years watching way too many not-great student films and it was painful back then and it hasn't gotten any easier with age and experience.  But another part of the problem was all the awards and all the gushing I saw online about this movie.  Like, ok, so I recently watched the new remake of Nosferatu and a few months ago I saw an early release of My Old Ass.  These are two VERY different films, but both of them were SO well done that they now live rent free in my head and probably will forever.

Nosferatu was a fucking masterpiece of classic horror with amazing lighting design, amazing wardrobe, amazing acting, amazing editing, amazing cinematography ... it was just goddamn amazing.  My Old Ass is a movie I never would have seen if I'd had my druthers, but my local theater is doing this "$5 mystery movie a week" thing where a movie ticket costs $5 but you don't know what you're going to see.  I love this idea and that was the movie they played so I went into it with absolutely no expectations whatsoever.  And it's exactly the sort of movie I would have avoided like the plague as being too artsy, too indie, too reminiscent of my film school days.

But it was exactly what that sort of movie *ought* to be.  The acting, the editing, the lighting, the sound design, the script, everything about it was a perfect example of that genre of film and it was charming and touching and a sheer delight.  That's what I expect to see from an arthouse film.

2 In The Bush touts itself as an arthouse film and it certainly won enough awards to justify itself.  But, to me, it didn't hold a candle to My Old Ass.  It felt like, as I said in the beginning, a college student's thesis project.  The script needed way more revisions and the actors all felt like ... the best that the director could call up from among her friends.

But the poly community fucking loved this movie.  And I know exactly why too.  It is, as I said in the beginning, such a relief to see a poly couple not being fucking unicorn hunting douchebags.  As I was telling my partner while we ranted about the movie, the poly community is SO GODDAMN DESPERATE to see itself represented in pop culture.  I've never seen anything like this before, I mean ... the queer community isn't even as desperate as we are.  We're like this super codependent incel dude just begging someone, anyone, to notice us, and then name-dropping all these films we supposedly "worked on" and celebrities we supposedly "know" like it'll make us cool by comparison and get us the Tiffany, or the Lisa, or whatever fucking codename the incels are using for the hot chick these days.  And it's a little pathetic.

So I get all kinds of submissions and requests to review movies that people SWEAR have some polyamory in it, but I have a whole library filled with cheating movies, swinging movies, casual sex movies, and very very broken people movies.  Not polyamory.  We make lists of supposedly "poly" celebrities every time we get even a hint of people having friends or lovers outside of their primary relationship without consulting the opinions of said celebrities as to how they see their own relationship, whether it's consensual or merely functional cheating as so often happens among powerful people.  I had to stop adding music to my poly music playlist on YouTube because it was getting to be filled with nothing but threesome sex songs or cheating songs, not real polyamory.

And along comes this movie with legit polyamory in it (although they don't use the word) and the preexisting couple isn't even toxic.  So naturally, poly people who see this film just eat this shit up.  It's the most amazing poly movie ever!

Except it's not.  It's fine.  It's a fine movie. It's enjoyable.  It has some good points in it.  But I honestly spent half the movie with my hand over my face.  Summer Lovers showed us how to create characters with personality, how to tell an audience why two people like each other, and more importantly, how to introduce a conflict that is all in one character's head - how she creates the problem out of thin air and her own issues when nobody is doing anything wrong and there aren't any villains in a story, and how to come back from that.

I understood why each of the characters in this movie were fucking each other.  I just didn't understand why any of them were *dating* each other because I never saw any character depth or relationship arcs.  And then people made decisions that don't match what earlier or later versions of themselves would do.  For instance, characters who say we only have 2 rules and those rules are all about honesty and communication would never find themselves facing a girlfriend who "just found out" that the two people she's been dating are also dating each other.  People who are that big into communication just don't make it that far without having clarified, at the very least, their poly family structure and partner tree.  They just don't.