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Courtesy of Disney| Brett Roedel
- Chloe Fineman and Sam Morelos play an unlikely mentor and mentee in this updated teen comedy.
Generations come and go, but teen movies never die. Even the perennial theme of ’80s high school comedies — losing one’s virginity — has somehow survived the pandemic and the much-touted decline of sex and romance among Gen Z. According to a recent Atlantic story, “Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage.” But you wouldn’t know it from watching Summer of 69, a new comedy that premiered at SXSW and is now streaming on Hulu.
Granted, the movie’s protagonist isn’t so much obsessed with achieving conventional coitus as with, well … let’s just say that the directorial debut of comedian Jillian Bell (Brittany in Brittany Runs a Marathon) most certainly does not take place in summer 1969.
The deal
Since elementary school, Abby Flores (Sam Morelos) has dreamed of dating her dreamy classmate Max (Matt Cornett). But he’s taken, and she’s better at imagining torrid romantic scenarios than at living them.
As their high school graduation approaches, Abby makes the world-shaking (to her) discovery that Max is suddenly single. As one does, she consults her Catholic school’s sports mascot (Fernando Carsa), a guy dressed like a Saint Bernard, on how to approach her crush. When he informs her that the way to Max’s heart is to perform a certain sex act (viz. the title), the inexperienced Abby despairs. Playing video games online for money is her main area of expertise, and she’s much more comfortable in a rubber zombie mask than a crop top.
Then Abby has a brainstorm. She barges into the local strip joint and offers a dancer named Santa Monica (Chloe Fineman of “Saturday Night Live”) a chunk of her streaming cash in exchange for tutelage in all things sexy. While Abby’s sweet, unknowing parents are out of town, the older woman becomes the teen’s mentor. But Santa Monica, whose life has stagnated since high school, could use a little guidance of her own.
Will you like it?
Like so many 21st-century teen comedies, Summer of 69 pays due respect to its predecessors — one in particular. Despite being a millennial, Santa Monica describes the 1983 film Risky Business as her sexual awakening, even re-creating Tom Cruise’s oxford shirt-and-Ray-Bans dance for a baffled Abby.
Aside from the premise of a jaded sex worker teaming up with a straitlaced high schooler, however, Summer of 69 has little in common with Risky Business, which was an arch, message-driven satire of capitalist amorality. By contrast, Bell’s film has a hit-or-miss looseness reminiscent of a different ’80s oeuvre.
In the indispensable guide Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies (itself a relic of 1997), Jonathan Bernstein describes the mostly forgotten filmography of director Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead) as “filled past capacity with scattershot gags, acts of whimsy and triumphantly realized running jokes.” That’s closer to the spirit Bell channels in this movie — minus the casual bigotry endemic to ’80s farces.
Summer of 69 is nothing if not scattershot. Brilliantly absurdist bits and clever throwaway lines (Abby notes that everyone at her school is named after “an apostle or a luxury product”) coexist with scenes that play like sketch comedy first drafts.
When it comes to depicting the strip club milieu, the screenplay (by Bell, Jules Byrne and Liz Nico) relies on hoary (whore-y?) stereotypes. Yet we still savor Paula Pell’s rip-roaring turn as a geriatric dancer named Betty Spaghetti and her quest to save the club from a creditor and rival (Charlie Day, wonderfully loathsome). The whole subplot is a shameless update on those old Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies (“Let’s put on a show!”), and it’s way more fun than it should be.
Santa Monica, too, is a caricature. Never relaxing in sweats like the title character in Anora, she’s always “on,” prancing around in streetwalker clothes — think Strip Club Barbie. But Fineman has expressive eyes that show us the desperation and insecurity behind this display of hyperfemininity.
Morelos, who’s likably matter-of-fact with a coltish charm, makes the perfect foil. We can see why Abby, eager to ditch the awkwardness of childhood introversion, chooses Santa Monica as her role model, even as the older woman herself clearly has plenty to learn.
Summer of 69 is no burn-it-all-down subversion of teen-movie conventions. It’s easy enough to predict how Abby’s courting of Max will go. A surfeit of hokey montages keeps the story moving, the ultimate message is uplifting, and the cheeky dialogue is about as raunchy as things get.
Yet there’s something refreshing about the movie’s breezy assumption that sex appeal is just confident playacting and anyone can learn the basics — a notion foreign to most ’80s movies, where there were winners and losers in the game of love. If anything can make relationships less daunting to today’s teens, it might be a goofy bit of nonsense such as this.
