Review of Humpday (2009) by Adeva L — 05 May 2010

Humpday' story is simple: two old male friends, now in their 30´s, meet after one of them, Andrew (Joshua Lenord), returns from a long absence having been exploring the world. The other one, Ben (Mark Duplass), followed the more classic life and is now married and he and his wife are trying to have a child. The arrival of Andrew will cause an unbalance in Ben´s new life and will take Ben to revisit the freedom and bohemia of a single man´s life style, that is so appealing for most men. In the middle of a fantastic bohemian night an idea is brought up by Ben and for motives of competitiveness ends up being accepted by the both friends they decide to make a pornographic movie of both of them, straight men, having sex.

The movie, constructed mainly by dialog scenes, plays with the male friendship bonding complicity and competitiveness because Humpday is about men, the male friendship and the innate difficulty of the male to adapt to the castrating and even suffocating domestic life. Mark Duplass gives his character a few non-masculine traits and there is even a story of a physical attraction for a strange man, but if his straightness is never doubted, there is room to doubt in our mind and probably in Ben´s in relation to Andrew. Andrew "more masculine accepts this idea without questioning the reasons, like Ben says this is supposedly for the sake of art ("it has never been done before, 2 straight men having sex with each other on film, it´s beyond gay says Ben). Andrew is more interested in the fact that Ben, being more conventional than him, is determine to carry this project through. If there is an obvious complicity between the men, there is also a lot of competiveness - this is shown in a physical basketball game between the two friends. And physicality between the characters is present all trough the movie, Ben and Andrew, touch each other frequently either of camaradage or in dispute. It is like an attraction/repulsion relation, feeling that both of them hold in relation to the project that they plan to complete. As for Ben´s wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore) she watches protesting against the husband new (old) experimenting phase. The movie is shot mostly with a hand held camera giving the film an instability that is in consonance with the instability caused by Andrew´s arrival. The film is heavily dependent on actors, that at certain times seem to be just playing along and improvising, and it is obvious that the movie was shot with few resources. Humpday is truly an indie film that keeps you fairly interested trough out the movie but it is also true that sometimes the dialogs and scene seem to drag for more time than needed and sometimes the acting seems not natural and forced. In the end you feel like the movie delivers less than it could.

We won´t reveal what happens in the last scene when the two friends finally go to the hotel room but we will say that Humpday weighted his positive and negative aspects is worth the trip to the movie theater.