“Duck Butter” Review: Good Lesbian Sex, Average Lesbian Mumblecore

One of the reasons bottle episodes end up being everyone’s favorites, and screenwriters love mirroring Midnight in Paris, is that confining characters to a single space or a specific amount of time adds an extra element of urgency and drama to everyday scenarios. Duck Butter, Alia Shawkat’s indie film that landed at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring and is now available on Netflix, joins Room in Rome and The Bold Type in taking that narrative construct and making it gay. Two strangers — Naima (Shawkat), a struggling actor in Los Angeles; and Sergio (Laia Costa), an untalented but aspiring artist and musician — meet at a club and hook up and decide to spend a sleepless 24 hours together, having sex once an hour, in an effort to skip that whole relationship thing where you spend months or years getting to know someone only to end up disappointed.

Actually, Naima declines the initial request, which her best friend Ellen (Mae Whitman) supports. “Can’t you just go to coffee,” Ellen asks, bewildered. But when Naima gets fired after her first day on set of the Duplass Brothers’ new movie (starring Kumail Nanjiani and Lindsay Burdge, of course), she rushes to Sergio’s house and begs her to follow-through on the offer.

At first it’s all sex and silliness and the kind of sleepless euphoric hijinks someone who actually has your best interests at heart would never let you do (sending a crass email to the directors who fired you and derailing your career, just for one example). But as the night wears on, the personality quirks that were evident in the club where they met start causing conflict. On that fateful night, Sergio coaxed a crowd of rowdy lesbians into enjoying her terrible musical performance by dropping into the crowd and making out with one of her hecklers, while Naima lectured a group of elderly lesbians in the corner about using up all the planet’s natural resources.

The categorically good things about Duck Butter are: 1) The sex scenes, which feel real and are not male gaze-y in any way; 2) the fact that the screenplay was co-written and the film was executive produced by Shawkat, an actual queer woman; 3) Shawkat’s performance. She’s a star; and 4) There are moments of real intimacy; most importantly, Naima’s recounting of a sexual experience that leads to Sergio explaining the concept of “duck butter” to her.

Whether or not the film lands with you in any real emotional way will probably depend on whether or not you relate to or find yourself drawn to either of the characters. If you think Sergio’s eccentricities are charming and not grating (I don’t) or if you think Naima’s inability to turn-off her persistent low-level panic about the state of the world is darkly funny (I do), it will feel more like an exploration of identity and less like a trudge to a clearly doomed end. Because the thing is, at the end of the day, Naima and Sergio realize who they are in relation to each other (not compatible) but nothing about themselves at all. Neither of them seem to register even the most pat lesson of their time together: That knowing how someone likes to fuck and be fucked, and knowing the stories they choose to tell you about their life, are not the same as knowing them.

I am a firm believer that the more queer movies we have out here in the world, the better, especially movies made my talented queer people. And the production value of this movie is excellent, dizzying even. But ultimately, for me, Duck Butter was a lot like a Naima and Sergio’s failed experiment: the sex was good but the delirious lesbian mumblecore didn’t leave a lasting impression.