Life is full of funny surprises. Just ask the young woman narrator (screenwriter Christina Beck) of director Marcel Dejure’s bleak and blunt noir comedy “Blow Me.” She’s lying on her bed trying to keep cool on a sweltering LA summer day when she receives a call from her old pal, Charlie (Mark Sovel). Seems Charlie, a chain tobacco/pot smoking coffee-aholic, has just recently moved to the City of Angels himself. Finally settled in and bored, he gives his blond friend a phone call.
Soon, the two of them are hanging out, more out of mutual pity and a desperation to avoid being alone than out of any genuine love or even affection for one another. None of which explains, however, how our narrator finds herself rather unenthusiastically giving oral sex to the similarly uninspired Charlie.
What follows is possibly the most tortured and roundabout version of the “just want to be friends” speech ever captured on film. It’s weirdly compelling, in a train wreck sort of way, watching these two co-dependents leech off one another in the same way two mere acquaintances quickly become fast friends at a party where each only knows the other. In that sense, at least, the surface affinity these two develop for each other makes perfect sense — at least for a short time — and makes it all the more logical that they get out when they can.
Crude and mean, really, yet still comical in a harsh kind of way, “Blow Me” ultimately turns into an oddly subversive, even surprising little morality tale of empowerment.
