Lady Parts (2024)

As Nancy Boyd’s Lady Parts was getting under way, I felt more than a bit uncomfortable.  I’m a 52 year-old man and this is a comedy that begins with the information that the film’s protagonist is experiencing severe vaginal pain.  And, because this is a comedy, there is a boatload of jokes that come at her expense.  Sitting in the audience at The Sidewalk Film Festival surrounded by an audience of mostly women guffawing at jokes involving tampons, vulvas, labias, periods, dilators, vibrators, gynecologists and something called a vulvar vestibulectomy I was cringing a little.

Mercifully, the movie settles down a bit.  It never hedges its bets or wusses out on the free flow of jokes involving menstruation and dilation but what starts out as a daffy comedy settles eventually into a nicely human story of family bonding

Our hero is Paige, played in a nice performance by Valentina Tammaro who has a bright, open face that is a comic vessel all its own.  She’s shy about a particular problem . . . down there.  It’s painful, like, all the time.  Her only hope is surgery, an experimental operation called a vulvar vesitbulectomy that her insurance won’t pay for.  Worse, it will lay her and have her in recovery for at least a year.  Even worse, she has just been offered a job as a writer’s assistant that she’s been working her butt off for five years to get.

So, putting her life on hold, she moves from L.A. back home to Philadelphia to have the surgery and then recover in the home of her uncomfortably supportive parents Linda and Steve (Amy Lyndon and Peter Larney) who are not shy about the gynological terminology even when they should be.

What is refreshing is that even while the movie is very funny it’s not absurd.  Given the structure, I went in expecting a lot of TV style comedy with half-ass jokes about near-sighted doctors and comedy of embarrassment.  The embarrassment is here but it is controlled in the way that you can tell that writer Bonnie Gross understands comedy; she understands how far to push it and when to pull back.

She also understands how to develop characters.  Based on her own experience she pulls the parents into the story initially as overly-understanding, but also gives them a heart.  Yes, while we’re laughing at jokes about pelvic exams, there’s a genuinely human feeling, but again, one that is controlled so that it doesn’t get all soppy.  This is a beautifully balanced film, you’re laughing but you care about what is going on.  There’s an evolution to Paige’s experience.  What starts with a lot of uncomfortable jokes settles into a dramedy about family, about bonding, about the value of not being shy about your own body.  The evolution of the story eases our discomfort.  I won’t give away the ending but, what happens at the end is funny, and also very touching.