Be Gay, Do Crime
"Daddy issues and swirl of queer amour fou combine for a lethal cocktail in Olmo Schnabel’s directorial debut Pet Shop Days. Jack (star and co-writer Jack Irv) is college-aged and rudderless, working for subsistence wages at the titular pet store. It’s there where he has the kind of chance encounter that only happens in a romanticized celluloid New York. (Call it a Dark Meet Cute. ) Alejandro (Dario Yazbek Bernal) is on the run from his upper class family in Mexico after an inciting incident. If that name and charismatic Cheshire Cat grin seem familiar, that’s because he’s the younger half-brother of the equally charming Gael Garcia. ) Eager to break out of the malaise of the similarly upper class life his wealthy parents (Willem Dafoe and Emanuelle Seigner) have provided him, Jack follows Ale down a path of debauchery. At first it’s a gleeful path until the volatile Ale’s streak of violence and cruelty begins to emerge. Irv wanted to create a doomed New York love story, set in a New York that doesn’t exist anymore. Schnabel and producer and co-writer Galen Core shaped Irv’s stream-of-consciousness fever dream of a crime drama into a (mostly) coherent storyline. Hunter Zimny’s cinematography dreamily captures the Big Apple on 16 mm. Although I find the largely negative critical consensus unfair, I do agree with the overall complaints about pacing and meandering storylines. The screenplay definitely could have used a few more drafts. But what made it into the cut is a compulsively watchable doomed love story. I would have loved an audio commentary and booklet essay but the two Q&A shorts answered a lot of the questions I had. The slip is eye-catching and evocative, darkly so on the back in its reference to a brutal third act scene. A flawed but fascinating gay love story/crime drama hybrid with a stacked cast, Utopia’s Pet Shop Days release is a worthy addition to any queer cineast’s library."