Jill Soloway's 'Afternoon Delight', won the directing award at the 2013 Sundance Festival. The critics weren't as kind: on Metacritic, there were 4 negative reviews, 10 mixed and only 7 positive. The film is really a dramedy, but more comedy than serious drama. Kathryn Hahn plays 'Rachel', a bored housewife in suburbia who is no longer having sex with her yuppie husband, Jeff.
Rachel is presented as a ditsy do-gooder who decides to drag her husband along to a strip-club in the hopes that this might spice up their sex life. There, Rachel gets a lap dance from the *, McKenna, and later seeks her out on the streets, where she offers to put her up at her home, if, in exchange, McKenna works part-time, as a nanny to her young son. Soon Rachel learns that McKenna is more than a *— she's a high end prostitute.
This is the premise of the film and it strains one's credulity that Rachel would actually even entertain the notion of putting up a prostitute in her house, a person who could end up harming her child. But Soloway is playing for laughs here—Rachel is a caricature of a do-gooder and Jeff is a passive schlub (the part of Jeff is particularly underdeveloped—he's someone we really never get to know at all).
Soloway gets serious in the second half of the film, contrasting McKenna's lurid lifestyle with Rachel and Jeff's need to restore the sanctity of their marriage. At one point, Rachel freely accompanies McKenna to see one of her long-term clients—and soon realizes it was a big mistake to come along, as she ends up sitting in the bedroom, watching the prostitute and her trick, make love.
In real life, McKenna may have ended up creating a lot more problems for the men she encounters, but here, the wily prostitute gets Jeff and his friends drunk at a poker game, and pulls one of the men into a room and has sex with him. There's some damage when the man's wife finds him with McKenna and makes it clear that their marriage is over.
McKenna almost succeeds in also ruining Jeff and Rachel's marriage, after he finally tells Rachel what a bad idea it was to let her stay with them (one wonders why Jeff didn't put his foot down from the get-go). Sure enough, Rachel realizes the error of her ways, begs forgiveness from her husband and their relationship is restored (as illustrated by the passionate lovemaking they engage in, at film's end).
While the overall story makes little sense, 'Afternoon Delight' has a few scenes here and there that will keep your interest. Particularly good is the interchange between Rachel and her lesbian therapist (in the end, Rachel must console the therapist, who realizes that she had taken her own relationship, for granted). There is also some frank sex talk throughout the film between the housewives, which at least gives the film a modicum of verisimilitude.
Often 'Afternoon Delight', has a sitcomish flavor. Despite this, the moral of the story is well-intentioned: better to work at your marriage, instead of throwing it away for fleeting passions.
