A group of aging friends decide to say goodbye to their youth with ... an orgy?  Joreth finds out if a bunch of single people can navigate group sex with respect and maturity, and does group sex make it poly or not?

 

OK, I have had this movie in my queue forever and people keep telling me about it. So I finally sat down to watch it. I'm gonna say that it's not poly but ... it's not NOT poly either.

Here's the thing, a little personal background on me: When I was in high school and college, I had ... um, friends. I had *those kinds* of friends. I remember having a couple of conversations with some guys who were flirting with me, where I tried to explain how my friends worked. I had never heard the word "polyamory" before I was 21, and I was DEFINITELY not into any kind of "open relationship". I was raised strictly white Christian middle class (there are whole articles out there about how people who aspire to a higher class tend to be quite rigid about class rules, while those who are comfortably in that higher class tend to break the rules all the time, and my parents were both blue collar and Latina trying to move up the class ladder, which means we followed the rules *exactly*, or else!).

So, in my world, there was no such thing as non-monogamy, ethical or otherwise. You met your soul mate sometime in your teen years, you got married (after college, of course), got a nice white collar job, had 2.5 kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs. Exactly as my parents did (seriously, it was me, the brain, and my sister the jock, a dog, my dad proposed to my mom at her senior prom, the only thing missing was the literal white picket fence).

Anyway, that was How Things Were Done. Except ... they weren't. So I was trying to find traditional "boyfriends" for a monogamous relationship, but how do you do that when you don't really get jealous and you can't handle your boyfriend getting jealous at you still being friends with your exes and half your social circle is made up of guys you've messed around with between boyfriends?

So, in these conversations, I very distinctly remember being asked more than once, if I have sex with my friends and I'm friends with my fuckbuddies, and my friends are actual, intimate, emotionally connected relationships, then what's the difference between them and boyfriends? I know that I had answers to those questions, but I don't really remember them now. What I know now is that I was really straying into Relationship Anarchy territory without that term having been coined yet.

So, this movie reminds me a lot of my teen years, and the kinds of friends I used to have. I would not call what my friends and I did back then "polyamory" and I'm not calling this movie "polyamorous". But I turned out to be poly because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have. Or maybe because this was the kind of friend group I liked to have, I ended up discovering that I was naturally polyamorous.

I'm going to say that this is *not* going on the poly movie list because there aren't any really poly-specific values or lessons or situations happening here, but it's definitely an example of why taxonomy needs to be taken with a grain of salt. As I've said in several reviews: taxonomy can help us to identify when something definitely is this thing, and when something definitely is not this thing, but there are always those things in between this and that.

And this movie is in between.

"A thirty-something party animal decides to throw one last crazy beach party at his father's swanky Hamptons pad. The only obstacles are convincing his reluctant friends to join in the fun, a blossoming romance and a real estate agent trying to sell the house out from under him."

This description manages to be both accurate and totally vague at the same time. Eric is a guy whose dad owns a beach house and he and his friends spend their summers there every year since high school. Eric's parties are legendary, with themes and costumes and tons of food and massive amounts of liquor and people crashing on the lawn furniture because they're too drunk to drive home, and cops being called 3 times in the same night and the neighbor loaning them a cow, and of course there's the one guy who always gets naked. I spent most of my own 30s going to parties like these.

Then Eric's dad decides to sell the house. So Eric decides to have the mother of all parties as their final hurrah. But how to top everything he's already done? Eric decides to host, not a giant bash like usual, but a small, intimate orgy, just between his closest friends who have been with him since they were kids and who actually stay in the house together every summer.

This takes a little convincing, but eventually the whole group is in, which includes 3 single women, 3 single men, and one guy who has a girlfriend who is not one of the high school buddies but is accepted as part of the group.

The weird thing about this movie is that the scenes where they're discussing and planning for the orgy are somehow simultaneously uncomfortable and also not necessarily wrong. So, for instance, there are a couple of scenes where they're each discussing with each other whether or not to do it, and they cover things like penis size and consent:

[inserted discussion montage]

Then there's the scene where Eric and his best buddy go to an underground sex party to do research on how to successfully host an orgy. The things that happen in this scene are things I've personally witnessed at "public" sex parties, but, while accurate-ish, they're also played as way discomforting for comedic value. That's actually kind of hard to do.

[inserted clip of sex party]

Before I saw this film, I was expecting one of two things - either a lot of gross humor and ultimately a failed orgy, or a party where somehow all of these friends end up coupling up and in a romantic dyads where each couple has sex mostly apart from the others. I even had a tweet prepared about having a pet peeve of "mainstream" movies thinking that an orgy means several individual couples having sex exclusively with their own partners, but in the same room.

And the movie did actually set itself up for one of these two endings. But it surprised me by not doing either one. There was a big tense moment where it looked like the orgy was going to blow up. And there was a lead up to some coupling up with at least one woman seeming to harbor a secret flame for one of the men.

But then things took a turn. And the orgy got started. The couple that was a couple before did stay a couple and didn't go outside of each other, but there's usually at least one of those at an orgy. Hell, *I've* been one of those couples at an orgy. And another 2 people ended up in what looked like the beginning of another couple. But A) it wasn't the couple that the movie set up for us, and B) they still mixed it up during the orgy even though they seemed pretty into each other.

But the morning after, everyone seemed cool with each other and all the friendships seemed intact. It was a one-time thing and they went right back to being friends. No weird, awkward, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice moment of regret and a return to normalcy by pretending it never happened.

So, after spending the last couple of decades around sex-positive, kinky polys, watching this group of mainstream people muddle their way though the complexities of group sex was a little awkward. But they reminded me of the people I used to be friends with before I had my own first orgy, they're just older than I and my friends were back then. So I actually kinda liked it. And, to be honest, I spent some time in New England with a now-former partner who lived there, who had friends who are not part of the poly, swing, or kink communities ... and I kinda think this movie nailed that kind of social group. I feel like I met all of these characters on one of my trips up North.

The one part that I really didn't like was what happened with the married couple. The orgy ended up being 8 people - 7 of whom were high school friends and the girlfriend of one of them who has been part of the group for a while since she started dating her boyfriend. But the complete pack is actually 10 people. Another couple is in a monogamous relationship, they have a baby together, and a wedding planned during the summer the movie takes place.

The group decides not to invite this couple because they have a baby and they would have been married about 2 weeks by the time the orgy takes place. For some reason, the idea of this couple having group sex with them squicks everyone out. And I can't figure out why, because the dating couple - the one guy from high school with his outside girlfriend - are exclusive too, and they have sex in the same rooms as the rest of the orgy participants, but they don't have sex with anyone but each other. So I'm not sure what the problem is with the married couple being involved, except that the group obviously has a set of assumptions about what "marriage" and "parenthood" mean.

The married couple eventually find out about the orgy plans and get upset that they weren't invited and they decide they want to participate, but the group tells them that they can't come. [inserted confrontation clip] Now, on the one hand, I do appreciate the group being clear about their boundaries. I would have been annoyed if they had tried some sort of shenanigans to get out of it, rather than just flat out telling them "no".

But on the other hand, once the married couple said that they were in, seeing as how the other exclusive couple was in, it was kinda a dick move not to include them. I had assumed up until that point that the reason they didn't invite them was because they figured they wouldn't want to because of their relationship, but it turns out that the group was the uncomfortable ones about their marriage and parenthood.

During the orgy, the married couple actually show up anyway, thinking that once they're in the house, nobody would actually kick them out. So, again, it's a "on the one hand, but on the other hand" sort of thing - first, it's really shitty of them to show up when they were told they weren't included, but second, I kinda wanted the orgy to have gotten over all their issues (as they did) and to welcome them once they were there.

Instead, the married couple peeked through the window, saw the initial weirdness and no sex happening, then decided to just have sex together in their minivan in the driveway, and that's the last we saw of them. [insert peeping tom clip] So I thought that was disappointing.

But other than that, it actually wasn't a terrible movie. A little crass, a tad boorish, even a bit mundane maybe, but perhaps only in comparison to my very liberal social bubbles. I come from that world, and I still work in that world, and, I have to admit, I even occasionally have fun in that world. I mean, I do listen to country music and watch '80s sitcoms.

So I am not calling this a poly film. But it's not that far off. It might even overlap a little bit. And I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

 

polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; relationship; polycule; group sex; swinging; partner swapping; ethical slut; movie review