Leading Ladies (2021)

I am not giving Leading Ladies a bad review because there is any particularly heinous or negative in the film. I am giving Leading Ladies a bad review because of the absence of anything particularly positive about it.

Leading Ladies follows a dinner party of five attendees, all queer women. As you might expect, they have quite a complex web of relationships. Diana is dating Ana. But Ana is having an affair with Silvia who is dating Ana Maria. Ana Maria is also Diana’s ex. The fifth attendee is Marcela who has drama less related to dating and affairs. Marcela has been absent from the others’ lives for a few months. Turns out, she was in jail and is hiding it from the rest of the group. The only person who knows is Ana. Ana had a large hand in the crime which Marcela got sentenced for.

I saw Leading Ladies at a film festival. During the introduction to the film, the director said that there was no script and the dialogue was all improvised. I’m not going to say you’d be able to tell that without knowing beforehand. I’ve definitely seen WLW films with worse dialogue that did have screenplays. I will say that the dialogue absolutely lacks a level of depth and insight. The actresses are all very good at conveying emotion but not necessarily good at coming up with a good turn of phrase, especially on the fly. There’s a level of poetry and care that is missing from the dialogue. It’s very standard, route one sentences. All are serviceable in advancing the plot, but at no point does a conversation have any lines that make me pause and think or admire.

Also, much as this is an improv movie, a lot of the action is repetitive. Leading Ladies shows the small amount of time from the point of view of each of the five characters. There is a lot of overlap. Little of this repeating of events offers much of a new perspective because the event in question is bland. A lot of the movie is the scene of the women all showing up at the house, greeting each other and making inane small talk. It adds little of interest to see this scene five times from five slightly different angles.

Leading Ladies is overall really thin on plot. I assume there was at least a guideline of a story to follow if not dialogue but maybe not. My general issue with the film is how little happens during it. Nothing dramatic happens until 40 minutes in when it’s revealed Marcela was in prison. After that, a few relationships break down. But at that point, it was really hard to care. Despite showing events from each character’s perspective, I don’t feel like I know them and I certainly don’t care.

The best way to describe Leading Ladies is in a useless, nonsense phrase common among my peers in high school. It’s whatever. Little of interest happens here. It’s a dinner party of five characters, none of whom are allowed depth because the film wants to pay equal attention to all of them. Between this and the improvised dialogue, no character grabbed by attention. This is not helped by how long it takes anything to happen in the movie and how fairly pedestrian the “shocking” revelations are. It’s all just whatever.

Overall rating: 3.5/10

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