Slut in a Good Way Combines Raunchy Comedy With Thoughtful Commentary

Back in October 2019, Joker director Todd Phillips commented that he had left making comedic movies because the current political climate made it impossible to make comedies anymore, everybody was just too sensitive nowadays for good comedy to even exist. Which is true, after all. We haven't had any good provocative comedies in recent years. Except for Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You. Or Olivia Wilde's Booksmart. Or Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit.  Or Riley Stearns' The Art of Self-Defense. Or the subject of this review, Sophie Lorain's Slut in a Good Way There simply isn't a single provocative comedy being made today, let alone one made up to the gold standard of wit found in the comedic masterworks of Todd Phillips.


But enough about dumb comments from Todd Phillips, let's talk about the utterly delightful Slut in a Good Way. This movie follows Charlotte (Marguerite Bouchard) and her two pals, Megane (Romane Denis) and Aube (Rose Adam), grappling with the fact that Charlotte's boyfriend just broke up with her after coming out as gay. Charlotte is sent into a downward spiral as a result of this development, but things start to look up once she and her two buddies get a job at a local department store for the holidays. Once here, Charlotte begins to have sexual encounters with an assortment of her male co-workers, leading her, but none of the guys she slept with, to develop a negative reputation at her place of employment.

Slut in a Good Way is very much a raunchy comedy about teenagers, but it isn't all weed and sex jokes. Catherine Leger's screenplay ends up contemplating societal double standards for sexual activeness between men and women that extend far beyond just the character of Charlotte. This is most clearly seen in how a co-worker at the department store is visibly pregnant and, per the co-worker herself, customers react with horror upon seeing her. The very idea that a woman could have had sex and is now carrying a child is treated by people as repulsive as an image from an Eli Roth horror movie. As you can imagine, that's kind of dehumanizing for the people who have to suffer the consequences of that behavior.

Through exploring how conventional societies' negative perceptions of women having sexual agency ends up dehumanizing women, Slut in a Good Way gets to reveal that it carries genuine affection for all of its primary characters. Like many of the best raunchy comedies (like last year's Blockers), Slut in a Good Way drops both genuine empathy and gross-out pieces of humor with equal measure. It's fitting that a film championing the importance of allowing women to embrace their individual personalities wouldn't reduce its characters to just hackneyed punchlines. Instead, an infectious sense of warmth towards Charlotte and friends is felt all throughout the film, especially in Sophie Lorain's careful direction.

Lorain's directorial style translates Leger's script into a film heavy on wide shots, extended takes and carefully timed pieces of visual humor. Whereas many American comedies tend to just look like network TV sitcoms that somehow managed to sneak into your local Cinemark movie theater, Slut in a Good Way understands that yukfests can be as visually interesting as any genre and that leads to a number of memorable gags relying heavily on the precise timing of where Lorain decides to place the camera. Speaking of timing, Louis-Phillipe Rathe's editing also helps to make certain gags extra humorous, like a hard cut used to cut between Charlotte announcing she's over her former lover and Charlotte howling to the heavens over her lost love.

Even during a somewhat rushed third-act that barrels through a newly introduced romance for Aube, as well as devastating turmoil between the three lead characters, these visual qualities of Slut in a Good Way, remain extremely commendable. The same can be said for the actors, who uniformly bring entertaining and humorous performances to the table. Our three lead actors are especially a delight both in their dynamic and in how they're able to create such fleshed-out distinct personalities for their individual characters, it's so much fun to watch such fully-realized and different demeanors play off one another. Kudos too to the person in charge of casting the male employees at the department store who capture the hearts of the lead characters, they look exactly like typical individuals who become heartthrobs for teenagers. Such attention to detail fuels the thoughtful comedy of Slut in a Good Way, though since it's not about bro's being bro's I'm not sure if it counts as a comedy in the eyes of Todd Phillips.