Can a movie that actually describes itself as a "cautionary tale" make the Polyish Movie List?  Joreth watches Kiss Me Again to see if this couple can open up their marriage to a bisexual women into a happy polyamorous triad, or is it yet another case of bad Unicorn Hunting?

 

Well that was a surprise.

I just watched Kiss Me Again. The Netflix summary says:

"Helmed by William Tyler Smith, this cautionary tale stars Jeremy London and Katheryn Winnick as liberal spouses trying to add zest to their sex life via a ménage à trois. When self-seeking college professor Julian persuades his wife, Chalice, to let lovely coed Elena share their bed, the physical coupling leads to emotional repercussions."

This sounds like I should hate it. It even says right in the summary "this cautionary tale". So I was expecting the usual "sexy hot bi babe turns out to be psycho and destroys their relationship", or even "frigid wife reluctantly agrees to threesome and leaves hubby for hot lesbo". Surprisingly, neither happened.

Julian and Chalice are a young, attractive, married couple with a wild bisexual roommate, Malika. We know she's wild because she's A) bisexual and B) has lots of tattoos. Malika has a long-time girlfriend, and one night she brings home a strange and creepy guy for a threesome with her and her girlfriend while the married couple sleep on the couch after an exciting night of pizza, wine, and rental classic movies. During the night, each half of the couple gets up and stumbles past Malika's room, where they glimpse the hot threesome and stay for a bit of a lookie-loo.

The next day, Malika teases Julian about watching them the night before, and lets it slip that Chalice watched too, and she watched for longer. So that plants the seed for Julian to begin thinking of hot bi babes and hot threesomes - hey, if Malika's relationship with her girlfriend can withstand casual sex and orgies, maybe there's something to it! So Julian gets up the nerve to propose a threesome to Chalice, using all the standard "it'll be good for us" tripe. Chalice immediately freaks out, offended, insulted, and condescending. But then she talks it over with Malika, who implies that Chalice is just a sheltered, naive, little girl, which pricks Chalice's pride. So she decides to have a threesome "for Julian", but really to prove to herself that she's not a sheltered, naive, little girl.

So they place a personals ad as a married couple looking for a hot bi FEMALE babe to experiment with.

Meanwhile, Julian is a young professor at a local university, where he is becoming known for stirring up trouble in his classes by *gasp* challenging his students to think. One of his students, a woman named Elena, has a crush on him. She invites him out for coffee, they flirt, and Julian discovers a growing interest in Elena. One day, they meet in the park, they kiss, and then Julian backs away saying that it isn't right, he can't do this, and that's where things end.

Until Chalice agrees to a threesome.

Julian approaches Elena and asks her to pose as someone responding to their ad, pretending to have never met Julian before. Julian rationalizes this by saying that if he wasn't married, he and Elena would probably be in a relationship right now anyway. Elena wants Julian bad enough that she agrees.

So, the threesome is set up under somewhat false pretenses, everyone meets, everyone likes everyone else, everyone fucks.

It actually goes very smoothly. Chalice wakes up in the morning without bad feelings, Julian is ecstatic, and Elena seems happy too. But then things go downhill, as you knew they had to.

Spoiler Alert!

Things go very smoothly. Too smoothly. It turns out that Chalice not only didn't have any bad feelings about the threesome, she had very good feelings about it. About Elena, specifically. Chalice seeks out Elena on her own and begins dating (and fucking) Elena behind Julian's back. Elena has started avoiding Julian and Chalice becomes distant with Julian. Julian's fantasy threesome seems to be taking both women away from him at a time when he needs them the most - he's having trouble with his unorthodox lessons at school and his career is in danger.

At first, I was irked with Julian for pulling the usual guy-routine and for starting this whole mess with a lie. I was ready to write off this whole movie as just another threesome-gone-wrong tale before it was even half over. But then things started to change. I became increasingly more sympathetic to Julian and increasingly more irritated at Chalice. This was less of a tale about threesomes-will-destroy-your-life and much more like the mess that the Unicorn Hunters often find themselves in because they're too busy thinking about themselves and not enough about the human element in the story.

One of the things the Unicorn Hunters do is think that they can pick some random hot chick, have sex with her for their own pleasure, and discard her without anyone getting hurt. They make rules saying "no falling in love" or "do everything together so we all move at the same pace". This never works in real life. When a triad happens to come out of a married couple finding a third, it worked by coincidence, not because rules like this actually work.

Julian and Chalice, like so many Unicorn Hunters, did not count on falling in love. And they did not count on falling in love at different rates. Chalice falls in love with Elena and poor Julian doesn't even know that they're together, let alone what their feelings are doing. Julian notices that both women are pulling away from him and he tries to get them to talk about it, but neither will. Eventually, Chalice's conscience kicks in and she tells Elena that they ought to "invite Julian back in", apparently without noticing the irony that it was Julian's idea in the first place and Julian and Chalice who invited Elena in. Elena agrees.

So they have another group date that results in a threesome, but Julian is primarily left out of the sex. He finds himself superfluous - the women are getting along just fine without his assistance and they don't even seem to notice that he's there. Things spiral out of control as Julian continues to push Chalice into talking about what's bothering her and she gets more and more snippy at him.

Enter Malika. About the time Chalice discovers that she's falling in love with Elena, Malika notices too. This is where we learn that Malika has a crush on Chalice. The movie was deliberately vague on whether or not Malika and Chalice actually had a relationship in the past, but Malika's jealousy prompts her to destroy Julian's and Chalice's marriage for daring to invite some stranger into their relationship instead of her. Remember that kiss in the park that Julian and Elena shared? Yeah, photographer Malika just happened to be in the park that day doing a shoot and just happened to take pictures of that kiss.

So Malika announces that she's moving out and leaves a stack of photos that she took of Julian and Chalice on the counter. Julian and Chalice come home at about the same time, both ready to apologize to each other and try to work things out, but they decide to look at the pictures first. Hidden in about the middle of the pile is the photo of Julian and Elena kissing.

Chalice completely loses her shit. She yells at Julian for fucking Elena behind her back (and no, she doesn't notice the hypocrisy here), calls him names, and storms out on him. Why the fuck do people get accused of doing things they didn't do and then they don't correct them? Julian does not tell Chalice that he never slept with Elena, he just keeps saying "it's not what it looks like, can we talk about this?" Dude, everyone knows "it's not what it looks like" is the code phrase for "it's exactly what it looks like but I'm stalling because I need to think up a good cover story".

So, at this point, I'm starting to revise my opinion again. I've gone from the first assumption that this movie is going to be a typical threesomes-are-doomed-to-fail movie, to "this is actually a bit polyish in that married poly newbies make these kinds of mistakes all the time and think they can prescript who will fall in love with who and at what pace", to now "oh great, lack of communication, hypocrisy, arrogance, this whole thing is going to shit".

At this point, I began to hate Chalice. While watching her stomp around, sneering at everyone and shouting insults, a repetitive litany ran through my head: "sanctimonious, pretentious, hypocritical, arrogant, self-serving, lying, double-standard, cheating asshole." I gotta hand it to the actor - she sure can sneer from atop her high horse very well.

So Julian's career is in danger, his wife is being a shit and has left him in a snit and managed to convince him that it's all his fault, and his girlfriend is pulling away from him too.

Julian has a meeting with the review board over a stunt he pulled in class that a particularly obnoxious little twit in his class reported him for (I was ready to smack the smug little bastard within the first 5 minutes of the movie), and Julian manages to escape with a verbal warning. So now that this particular weight is lifted, he looks like he's ready to tackle the next challenge.

Julian is in class, giving the day's lecture, and Elena has shown up, for once, when there's a knock at the classroom door. Julian opens it to find Chalice standing there, practically glowing with self-righteous anger. Here's the next bonehead move. Julian doesn't excuse himself from class and step outside, closing the door, guiding his pissed off wife away from his classroom. No, he stands there in the open doorway while she throws a fit.

And boy does she throw a fit. I was appalled. She barges into the classroom and starts shouting all the details of their current situation in the most graphic terms she can think of. She accuses Julian of fucking his student Elena in front of everyone (which he, again, doesn't deny, he just keeps asking if they can talk about it elsewhere), of Elena being the slut that Julian brings into their marriage so they can both fuck her, and of the two of them lying to her and doing this whole thing as a joke on her. Then she storms out, after having ruined, not just Julian's chance at tenure, but possibly his job at this institution, his entire career, and maybe even his freedom if the little shit who reported him for the last infraction tattles to the school newspaper again, this time about the Prof boffing the co-ed (keep in mind that they're all very close in age - this is university, not high school).

Julian and Chalice both wind up back at their apartment at the same time again, where Julian finally tells her that he never slept with Elena, that it was just one kiss, that he loves Chalice, that he's sorry, and nothing he can say makes Chalice feel better. She dismisses everything he says with more of her perfect pouty little sneers and storms out again.

Chalice goes to see Elena, but for some reason, this woman who she's only known for a few days (weeks?), who she has just accused of conspiring with her husband to have an affair behind her back and to rub it in her face by talking her into a threesome, Elena does not get the hellfire and damnation side of her anger. Chalice goes and calmly asks her to explain.

So Elena does, and Chalice believes her. Oh-their-fucking-god I wanted to wring Chalice's neck!

The next morning, Julian arrives at Elena's place looking like shit and asking if Chalice was there. Elena says yes and invites him in. He cries at Elena's kitchen table about how sorry he is for getting her involved in this mess and how it's all his fault. Elena does not admit to fucking Chalice behind his back. But Chalice comes in and sneers down at Julian in silence for a moment while Julian sits there looking like a puppy who has been whipped by his favorite master. Eventually Chalice suggests that all three of them go for a walk together and they'll talk it out when they get to the park. Her sneer slips and she looks patronizingly down at him as if deigning to forgive him for his transgressions, while hope floods his face.

Can you tell how much I dislike Chalice at this point?

The movie ends with the three of them walking in the park - Julian holding Chalice's hand, and Elena holding Chalice's other hand.

(End spoilers)

So, I think this deserves to be on a poly-ish movie list for a few reasons. One is that I see a lot of similarities between how these characters got into their mess and how a lot of couples flail around the poly community. Another is that the characters had an emotional connection to their hot bi babe. It may have started out as "just sex", but it became more about feelings and relationships - and Julian and Elena had their own emotional connection to each other before the threesome ever got proposed and Chalice and Elena develop their own emotional connection to each other. And another is that, although this was billed as "a cautionary tale", I believe that it was left open for interpretation, and my interpretation of the movie was that of a more honest and open future for our characters.

These movies are so difficult to explain why I think they're poly without giving away the ending. If you choose not to listen to the spoilers because you want to watch the movie and be surprised, know that I do have some movies on my poly-ish movie list that do not end happily-poly-ever-after, but they are on the list because they show polyamory of a sort in a positive, or at least honest, light. This was one of those movies that I flip-flopped on whether or not I thought it was poly. But after watching the whole thing, I do believe that there are definitely some poly elements in this film, and it might be cautionary in the sense that things can go horribly wrong, but I did not get the sense that this movie was yet another anti-poly-moralizing tale. You could argue that some of the things the characters did are classic examples of What Not To Do, but that the moral of the story did not appear to be "non-monogamy is doomed to fail no matter what and here, watch this train wreck to see why".

So, bottom line - I'm keeping this on the list of poly-ish movies and I enjoyed watching it. But be prepared to yell at the characters when they do things that we all know are foolish and hurtful.

 

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