Raise your hand if you’re tired of films that strangle you with life lessons and dramatic redemption arcs. Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing inherently wrong with characters who grow over time and change for the better. These kinds of stories are as old as the hills and have worked for time immemorial, but there are other kinds of stories too.
I’m a firm believer that movies don’t always need a moral center to define them, and that sometimes a character simply living the best way they can is enough to move the story and the character development along in a compelling way. As it turns out, Todd Flaherty’s Chrissy Judy is an intriguing and stylish example of the latter, but it sprinkles in partial traces of the former just for good measure.
Set in the world of mediocre part-time drag queens (Wyatt Fenner as Chrissy and Flaherty as Judy, the drag personas they go by), Chrissy Judy borrows its visual style and tenor from early Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee movies, using grainy black and white photography to accentuate the intentional artifice of its subject matter while softening and smoothing the moments in between its performances and parties.
While full-color extravagance might have also worked from a visual standpoint, it would have weakened the sense of drudgery and melancholy felt by its main characters. Let’s face it, black and white is bleak, and while the story isn’t one of hopeless desperation, it is one based on selfish behavior and a lack of empathy – two aspects of the human condition ripe for fatalistic exploration and, by extension, tailor-made for monotone cinematography.
But there’s more to Chrissy Judy than just visual panache. It’s also an ode to living life on one’s own terms despite the financial difficulties that arise from the gig economy grind so many of us have found ourselves in. As both Chrissy and Judy strive for something more out of life than catering jobs and overdue rent, their rather codependent relationship becomes more than a little strained, resulting in the inevitable breakup of not just their act but their long-standing friendship. As Judy trudges on as before, Chrissy makes a new life for himself elsewhere.
Flaherty proves especially adept at depicting both the rigors and the aspirations of an entire generation that is currently rejecting the status quo by choosing creative and personal fulfillment over a life of plodding servitude, bank accounts and credit scores be damned. It’s this brush-off of established economic exploitation, more than anything, that makes Chrissy Judy a film so worth seeing. And mark my words, as millennials and Gen Z begin to take a more prominent role in the movie industry, these kinds of stories will become more common. That is, until the kinds of demands they’re making are met and they themselves become antiquated.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.