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Sep 05, 2023
Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott’s new movie is an ode to the fact women can be messy, too.
Bottoms director/co-writer Emma Seligman and actress/co-writer Rachel Sennott dove into the film industry with their 2020 debut film, Shiva Baby, and we’ve been obsessed with the duo ever since.
After hopping on a call with Bottoms producer Alison Small to talk about Shiva Baby, Sennot and Seligman were asked if they were working on anything else. That’s when Seligman said yes, that she and Sennot had written an unhinged comedy whose working title was Gay High School Fight Club. Obviously, everyone was sold on it off the bat.
Seligman and Sennot set out to create the kind of horny coming-of-age movie for queer women that straight, cis men have gotten time and time again. Think Superman, American Pie, Wet Hot American Summer, Kick-Ass… only, wittier, sluttier, and written for the gays by the gays.
Finally, some good ol’ fashioned queer chaos that isn’t rooted in trauma.
Bottoms feels like the kind of movie I’ve been waiting for my whole life. It’s fun, vibrant, honest, and actually captures what it’s like to be a teenage girl trying to get laid!
The whole film feels like the most frank and honest depiction of what it was like to be young, queer, and horny that I’ve yet to see in cinema. Bottoms is not trying to overly intellectualize or romanticize what it’s like to want to lose your virginity desperately.
It’s not trying to ground itself within some morally righteous lens. It just is. And yeah, believe it or not, that’s exactly what we’ve been missing and needing in queer cinema.
The movie perfectly exists under what I like to call campy vulnerability. As in, it takes very real and complicated emotions like female rage, teenage sexuality, yearning, and the fear of rejection, and processes it on-screen through wit, humor, and cleverness. All while being hilariously absurd and gay as hell.
Bottoms is our summer must-watch, and it’s now playing in theaters.
Daniela Ochoa-Bravo is a writer and creative based in Brooklyn, born in Bogotá. She is the Founder and Editor of Colectivo Tabú, a project dedicated to democratizing the publishing industry by creating a space where the works of emerging and established artists can seamlessly coexist alongside each other.
