Rita, Sue, & Bob Too! was hailed as a landmark comedy in the '80s in Britain, and also passed around polyamorous online groups as a poly film.  But is it?  Is it both?  One or the other?  Neither?  Joreth reviews this wildly acclaimed movie for any hint of polyamory, open relationships, or consensual and ethical non-monogamy to see if it lives up to the hype.

 

I just watched the creepiest fucking movie ever.

Rita and Sue are teenagers about to graduate high school. At least, I think. It's a film from the UK and I am one of those annoying US-centric Americans who has very little information about how the rest of the world does things, so I have absolutely no clue how the educational system works there, but it's weeks away from the end of their mandatory schooling and when they can move out of their parents' homes.

Rita and Sue are babysitters for Bob and Michelle. Again, I have no idea how that system works, but they are apparently both sitters. When I used to babysit, if the parents were going to be out particularly late, I was sometimes allowed to invite a female friend over to keep me company, but I was the only paid sitter. It was never explained how it works for Rita and Sue, I imagine because everyone in the UK already knows how it works. But they both sit together regularly.

So anyway, Rita and Sue babysit one night and Bob drives them home. Only he doesn't go home. He starts asking them creepy questions like if they're virgins and if they know how to put on a condom. The girls act insulted and antagonistic, but given how they behave throughout the rest of the movie, apparently antagonism is foreplay. So Bob takes them to some desolate cliff overlooking their town and fucks them both.

This is the third scene in the movie, and it only gets ickier from there.

SPOILERS:

There is absolutely no way to explain the poly part of this movie without giving away the ending. Sorry. At least you don't have to sit through 2 hours of it to finally get to the poly part.

Eventually we learn that his wife, Michelle, doesn't like sex and hasn't had sex with Bob in ages, but refuses to allow him sex elsewhere. We also learn that this isn't the first time Bob has cheated on her and Michelle knows about the first time - their last babysitter. They fight constantly over Michelle's lack of desire and Bob's infidelity and she continually accuses him of fucking the two teen girls, which he denies. Meanwhile, Bob makes regular trips to the high school where the girls ditch class to go fuck.

The sex scenes are uncomfortable and gross. Each girl waits her turn outside of the car, hurling insults and asking if he's almost done. The girls bicker and fight with each other and with everyone around them. They both come from the lower class neighborhood, with Sue's father being a fall-down-drunk and her mother complaining at her father while her father rages at Sue.

Eventually, the threesome are seen at a nightclub by Michelle's best friend, who promptly tells Michelle about it. Michelle then drags her friend over to Rita's house, drags Rita out by the sweater and over to Sue's house, where Bob shows up, and everyone stands on the front stoop shouting at each other - Michelle, Rita, Sue, Sue's mum and dad, and Bob.

Then, from out of nowhere, a gang of dirtbikers comes tearing down the street and onto the apartment building's lawn, circling the live re-enactment of Jerry Springer outside, and Rita jumps onto the back of one of the bikes and they all ride off together, leaving Sue screaming and on her own. Michelle speeds home, packs her kids and a few things, and destroys everything else, and leaves before Bob gets back.

The next day, Sue walks over to Rita's house, as she does every morning to walk to school together. Rita announces that she's dropping out of school two weeks before they graduate because Bob has asked her to move in with him (but not Sue), that Rita has been with Bob lots of times without Sue, that they didn't use condoms, and that Rita is now pregnant. Hurt and offended that she was not asked to move in and that Rita was with Bob without her, Sue storms off, only to run into Bob outside, who offers to continue boffing Sue on the side. Sue gets offended at the idea of screwing around with her best friend's man and storms off ... er ... continues storming off.

Sue starts dating some kid who we met earlier who made a bet with his buddy that he'd nail Sue before the buddy did. Again, Sue is antagonistic and insulting, but that doesn't put off our intrepid Aslam. After Aslam gets insulted by Sue's drunk father, they move in together with Aslam's sister, who keeps them in separate rooms.

Rita ends up having a miscarriage and Sue goes to see her at the hospital. Bob drives Sue home and Aslam goes into a jealous rage, accusing Sue of fucking Bob and threatening to wring her neck if she even so much as looks at another man again. Back at Rita and Bob's house, Bob calls out Sue's name during sex, which pisses off Rita, who promptly storms down to Sue's house to accuse her of sleeping with Bob.

So far, NONE of this is sounding very poly, but it's a lot dysfunctional.

Apparently, Rita runs into Aslam and tells him about the incident with Bob and her intentions for Sue ... at least I assume that's what happened, because we see the two of them stalking up to Aslam's house but Aslam makes Rita wait outside. Alsam goes into the house and starts screaming at Sue about being a slut and a whore and smacks her across the face. Sue has no idea what he's talking about, of course. Alsam lets Rita into the room to explain, but before she can say anything, Alsam attacks Sue and starts choking her. So Rita attacks Aslam, kicking him in the nuts and the two girls run away.

Back at Rita and Bob's house, Rita puts ice packs on Sue's neck and they appear to have made up, as Rita apologizes for accusing Sue, resulting in Aslam's attack. Aslam arrives. Now, Rita and Sue live in a poor neighborhood, but Bob's house is in an extremely nice neighborhood. And Aslam is Pakistani. So naturally a brown person walking through a white, upper class neighborhood is justifiable cause to call the cops - or so the nosy neighbor who is always watering his lawn thinks, because he does so immediately upon seeing Aslam, before he even reaches the house.

Aslam, Rita, and Sue carry on a shouted conversation through the various windows around the house as Aslam begs to be let in to talk to Sue and Sue refuses. Eventually he threatens to take some pills and kill himself if Sue won't take him back. She not only calls his bluff, but she hands him a glass of water through the pet door. Alsam fakes a suicide but just before Sue backs down, the cops show up and Aslam takes off running.

Now Bob comes home to find Sue and Rita sitting on the couch. Rita announces that Sue is moving in, that Rita and Sue will be sharing the master bedroom, and that Bob can sleep in the dog's bed from now on. The two girls leave the room. Bob wanders around the house aimlessly, probably wondering what the hell happened to his nice and tidy life, and eventually wanders upstairs ...

... where he finds Rita and Sue both in bed, topless, with a space between them, waiting for him. They say in unison "took you long enough!" and he leaps into the bed with them. The end.

So, there's nothing poly about this movie until *maybe* the final 3 seconds of the film. The first part isn't poly because it's a married man cheating on his wife with two fucking teenagers. The middle part isn't poly because he chooses only one of the teens and the other gets into an abusive relationship. But since it could be argued that the very very end of the movie involves three people in a live-in, consensual relationship, that makes this a poly movie.

But I disliked this movie more than I disliked Café au Lait. At least in Café au Lait, the three characters all live together for about half the film, even though they disliked each other. In this one, the three title characters don't dislike each other, exactly, but they don't seem to really like each other either. But, to be fair, they don't seem to like anybody, or anything. Everyone in the movie fights with everyone else. Apparently, that's just what life is like Yorkshire. The reviews keep calling it "realistic". That's a terrifying thought. The movie also got rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, and Sundance.

I can't understand why everyone loved this movie. Just showing people argue with each other and daring to set a film in a slum doesn't make for a "gritty film", in my opinion. So the girls are poor, and there's a lot of cussing and fucking. Big deal. The characters were unlikable and their motivations were random and unpredictable. But I guess if you live in an area where nobody likes anyone, you don't expect the characters to like each other. They just have to agree to stay together. Although I'm not sure why anyone *does* stay together if you don't like each other and there's no financial incentive. I guess it's just something you do.

I've already established that it's still a poly film if the movie ends with a breakup, as long as the *reason* is not that polyamory itself destroyed the relationship. If a movie shows functional polyamory that's destroyed by outside pressures, or even by personality conflicts but not because there are multiple people, then even if the relationship ends, it's a poly movie. So is it a poly film if the opposite happens? Does it count as poly if there is no poly in the movie anywhere but it has a "happy" poly ending? I guess so.

I'm grudgingly keeping this movie on the list because of the ending. But I hated it.

I have since learned that this movie is based on a true story. Apparently this was first a play and the playwright really did have an affair with a married man with her best friend while they were teenagers. But it did not have a "happily ever after" ending and the author was very unhappy about that change in the screen adaptation. The playwright, Andrea Dunbar, really did live in Yorkshire in a poor neighborhood and apparently did have the kind of hard life that one expects from poverty, including dying very young - at age 29 of a brain hemorrhage in the same pub that we see the father of one of the girls stumble out of at the beginning of the film.

Dunbar wrote 3 plays before she died, all based on her life as a poor young woman in Britain. She was considered "ahead of her time" and "brilliant" and was one of the first to showcase what it was like to live in poverty in her modern age, including domestic violence, teen pregnancy, alcoholism, etc. I suppose in 1987, seeing this story on the big screen was considered revolutionary, and maybe I would have had a different view of the film had I seen it closer to when it came out.

But the film was billed as a "comedy" and I didn't think it was funny in the slightest, and it was also billed as "gritty", which I think utterly fell flat since they were trying to make it "lighthearted" so it wasn't "gritty" to me either. Had there not been the cheesy "poly ever after" ending, and had they tried for more realism instead of "look, life here is hell, but we're having a good time anyway!" tone, I might have enjoyed the film more. Perhaps the play is more like that.

 

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