Director Victoria Negri’s emotionally amplified short film 2 Weeks presents a personal crisis for a young actress who’s discovering that she’s asexual. Tanya is played by mononymous actor MARS, who also wrote the script based on real-life experience. Tanya’s realization that she doesn’t desire physical intimacy in the same way most other people seem to puts her in a very weird space in the highly sexually charged atmosphere of an industry that trades on sex appeal. Her partner, Izzie (Analine Ignacio), doesn’t accept this change and leaves. Her manager Don (Bradley Calcaterra) is unsympathetic to her wish to stop auditioning for roles as the “hot girl.”
Tanya’s distress is further compounded by the fact that her friends are fiercely expressive in terms of sex on a woman’s terms, indicating empowerment. Still, it would never occur to them that identifying as asexual is also claiming one’s power. The storm in her mind comes to a cusp when someone tells the group that he and his partner have agreed that if they haven’t had sex for two weeks, then it’s fair game to be intimate with someone else… sort of a “conditionally poly” arrangement. Tanya is destroyed, comparing this emphasis on sex to her own lack of desire.
“…a personal crisis for a young actress who’s discovering that she’s asexual…”
There is a moment in the film when everyone around Tanya, whether straight or queer or something else, seems nothing more than a pack of wolves bent on defiling and devouring her. She feels intensely threatened by the sexual energy, and her world comes apart at the seams.
Working together, Negri and MARS paint a vivid picture of Tanya’s quiet desperation in this upheaval. 2 Weeks is an insightful look at a moment of truth for someone discovering a shattering reality about herself.
"…vivid...insightful..."
