THE ART OF BEING STRAIGHT
Written & Directed by Jesse Rosen
Produced by Ursula Camack & Amy Wasserman
Released by Here! Films/Regent Releasing
USA. 70 min. Not Rated
With Jesse Rosen, Rachel Castillo, Johnny Ray Rodriguez, Pete Scherer & Jared Grey 
 

When you write, direct, and star in a debut with almost no background in feature filmmaking, surely you do it because your work is a labor of love in which you strongly believe. It’s not uncommon—young filmmakers do this all the time. That’s what’s confusing about newcomer Jesse Rosen’s The Art of Being Straight, a film about the two weeks it takes for Jon (Jesse Rosen), a recent college graduate and accredited lady’s man, to realize that he’s at least a little bit gay. Why put in so much effort into a fairly simple coming-out story?

This is not a difficult discovery for Jon. He moves to Los Angeles to hang out with his old jock buddies from college, gets a job at an advertising agency, and his boss seduces him in one sleazy try. Then comes the binge drinking and reactionary sex with a flirty blonde to sublimate his newfound male predilections. After he realizes that there’s more to sex than sex, he starts to accept his new identity, whatever that will be. Rosen moves through these stages of sexual rebirth with believable grit and some real tenor, but his character’s journey into alternative sexualities is too quick and easy.

Jon’s old college friend Maddy (Rachel Castillo) is also working out some sexual conflicts. A proud and belligerent lesbian happily in a relationship at the film’s outset, Maddy’s surprised to find her new male neighbor so loin-churning. But Rosen’s written Maddy like a cartoon character, and her story is played for laughs. When she finally decides to sleep with the man, he asks her if she has a condom, to which she replies, “I’m a lesbian!” By the time he comes back with protection, she decides the straight life isn’t for her, and the storyline is over. Castillo’s charismatic line readings are really comical and entertaining, but the plot parallels between Maddy and Jon feel so uneven in tone that the film becomes a flat queer pastiche, like 1999’s Better than Chocolate.

The emotional cost of accepting male bisexuality by a lead character is rarely seen onscreen with such focus, but what’s the point of such a facile exploration? There’s an entire Netflix category called “Steamy Sexual Awakening Films”—the bulk touting male leads—and this film is destined for that category upon its DVD release. Zachary Jones
June 5, 2009