Plan B

There's a really unnecessary scene about half way through Plan B that will be it's main talking point if it gains an audience. A cumbersome penis with a horrifyingly misplaced piercing is plopped out of it's pants onscreen while one of our heroines inches closer and closer to it. She really doesn't want to be near it but it's a complicated situation and she's doing what's best for her. You'll grimace at what's happening and you'll be thinking to yourself "surely on earth they are not going to show this." They don't thankfully but it's a moment that will be bandied about on social media that may put people off an otherwise sweet, heartfelt and progressive film about friendship. Yeah, the irony of this paragraph isn't lost on me.

America. 2021. The land of the free. Making your own mind up. Free will. The pursuit of happiness and all that jazz. None of it matters a jot when you're facing a man of religion forcing his beliefs on you. Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) finds this out the hard way when she tries to buy the Plan B pill in a nearby pharmacy and gets refused. She's panicking after an ill advised 30 seconds of drunken sex at a party and in her culture anything pre-marital is a sin so a pregnancy would be a nightmare. Her best friend Lupe (Victoria Moroles)  knows what to do. There's a planned parenthood clinic in the nearest city and a roadtrip is in order. Lupe has her own agenda too. An agenda she's been keeping secret from Sunny and from her own religious family. A secret that's been weighing on her mind for quite a while now.

Plan B is a lot funnier than you'd think if you've read this far. It will piss off right wing conservative America something fierce. The story of two teenagers discovering their own differing sexualities will set alarm bells ringing in the red states and when they realise both are played by actresses of colours they might self combust. This is one of the many reasons you should watch this. It's absolutely unapologetic, it doesn't moralise, it never feels the need to explain away it's characters actions. These are things that happen everyday, to millions of people all over the world, and yet they are rarely talked about and made very difficult to deal with due to societal attitudes. 

Around the halfway mark Sunny's sitting in a dinner with the boy she really fancies. As they eat she lays everything out on the table, all her problems. There's no fake drama created by hidden secrets. It's one person pouring their heart out to another and it's an astonishing little moment. It's the theme of the film in a nutshell. Open, honest discourse, it's really the only way to go. Even life long friends Sunny and Lupe, who claim to know each other inside out, keep things from each other, it leads to tensions and inevitable bust ups and because Verma and Moroles are so good in their roles it feels like a punch when it happens. We've seen it before of course, in films like Booksmart, Superbad, Lady Bird, last years Unpregnant ( which is very similar to this) but it's so well played by the pair that you'll be hooked. 

Plan B is streaming online now. It's funny, sweet, incisive and somehow manages to keep it's broader side in check. It's a film aimed at teenagers that asks important questions and doesn't just exist to move from one shock moment to the next. Keep an eye out for everyone involved in this, especially director Natalie Morales, they've big things coming in their futures.