Frameline Film Review: ‘Freelancers Anonymous’
Billie (Lisa Cordileone) is trapped in an office job which she hates and is only sticking out because she is marrying her girlfriend Gayle (Natasha Negovanlis) in three months time. However, when her Boss overloads her with work and cuts both her working hours and benefits, she leaves determined to find her ‘own thing’ whatever that means.
When she comes across a ragtail bunch of women (and one solitary silent man) hanging around a church hall every day on the pretext of networking for freelance work, she thinks she has found her calling. Convincing these somewhat reluctant women that if they pooled all their talents together they could control their own destinies by creating an app that would link prospective employers up with freelance workers.
It’s not actually a new idea but Billie persuades them that they could create one that would have an edge in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, Gayle who spends her working days online promoting her own “Life Is A Cabernet’ wine and also making audio tapes of soft porn novels, is steaming ahead with Patty their wedding planner arranging a potential very expensive wedding without the funds to actually pay for it.
Here the storyline gets a tad messy when Billie pretends that the new start-up Company is paying her a wage but she is fact using funds entrusted to her by one of the girls for a Launch Party of the App. Then when her ‘borrowing’ is discovered, Billie still persuades the other girls to continue with the project and suggests to save money, the Launch will be at the Church Hall on the very same day of her wedding. All she has to do is keep this new development away from Gayle’s ears, and just spend her wedding day dashing between her marriage ceremony and the investors meeting for the App.
This is the sophomore feature from Spanish Filmmaker Sonia Sebastián (who delighted audiences with her hysterical lesbian farce Girl Gets Girl) and she has filled with her cast with a very impressive array of extremely talented actors. The movie reeks of good intentions with its tale of girl power but that, however, is still not enough to get any real laughs from the very labored script written by Cordileone and Amy Dellagiarinon who relied far too heavily on cliched stereotypes to form most of the characters and their very contrived plot.
Freelancers Anonymous is an amusing film which will hopefully find an audience. but there are no real laugh-out-loud funny moments, and it simply is not a comedy in any true sense of the word.
‘Freelancers Anonymous’ will be shown at Frameline 42 at teh Castro Theatre, Friday, June 15 at 6:45 p.m.