DVD Review: Concussion

By Less Lee Moore

The tagline on the DVD for Concussion is the kind of lurid text that implies we’re going to watch a Lifetime movie from the 1990s: Wife. Mother. Escort. When you examine the plot—middle-aged wife and mother gets hit on the head and then creates a secret life as a prostitute—it doesn’t do much to dissuade that notion. Yet Concussion isn’t a cautionary tale and the head injury doesn’t produce dissociative fugues; no one gets blackmailed, kidnapped, or murdered. It’s a frank examination of dissatisfaction and desire that could easily be transposed onto a heterosexual relationship, but in Concussion the married couple are lesbians with two kids.

The film opens with images meant to convey the staid, upper class suburban world Abby Ableman inhabits: large houses with well-manicured lawns interspersed with women in spin and yoga classes set to Bowie’s “Oh! You Pretty Things,” a harbinger of the rebellion in which she’s about to partake. As a stay-at-home-mom and former interior designer, it’s clear that Abby’s needs aren’t being met by her busy divorce lawyer wife Kate (Julie Fain Lawrence) before she even says anything about it. They’ve settled into a domestic routine of complacency in which Abby takes care of the kids, the house, and cooking but Robin doesn’t seem invested in any of it. This is made uncomfortably clear when Kate falls asleep after Abby initiates sex or she has to find out how Abby’s doing by asking her friend, Pru.

Even though there’s no melodrama in the script, Robin Weigert is riveting as Abby. Her facial expressions and posture say more about her inner turmoil than any shouted words. Yes, there are a lot of sex scenes in the film, but nothing overly explicit or exploitative. This isn’t a straight man’s vision of lesbian softcore porn. You can actually witness Abby’s transformation through her encounters with a variety of women of a variety of ages, personalities, and body types. It feels more like sex as therapy, self-discovery, and nurturing than someone who’s “just horny” as her nameless Madam (known only as The Girl) misunderstands, especially when Abby gives a client a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It’s prostitution as Feminism 101. This isn’t meant as a critique; Concussion thrives on a fair amount of dry humor and subtle satire.

Concurrent with her exploration into her sexuality, Abby returns to interior design when she fixes up a condo with her contractor friend Justin. This is where she meets her clients and as her independence flourishes, so does the work on the condo. She creates a safe space where she can be her real and true self, ironically one in which she doesn’t know the names of her clients and adopts the pseudonym Eleanor.

Ostensibly straight and married neighbor Sam Bennett (Maggie Siff) eventually becomes one of Abby’s clients and after the initial awkwardness at this colliding of worlds, there’s a definite chemistry. But writer/director Stacie Passon doesn’t take the clichéd route by having Abby throw her life away because she’s fallen in love with Sam. No, Sam and her husband are obviously in love and not afraid of PDA. She’s just bored.

This is why the end of Concussion is a bit frustrating. We know that Abby’s expressing herself by renewing her passion for interior design and taking control of her sexuality in a way that she wasn’t previously allowed to do. So Kate finds out her secret, shaming her nudity in the process, nothing really changes. Abby goes back to her life, continues to take care of the kids, and contemplates a hot yoga class, with one difference. She finds a new property to restore but there’s no implication that she’ll continue to be a prostitute. It seems she didn’t really want to escape, and like Sam, she was just bored. It’s a shame that Concussion ends on such a disappointing note, although closing with Brian Eno’s “Some Of Them Are Old” is a nice touch.

Concussion was released on DVD on January 28 by Anchor Bay Entertainment and RADiUS-TWC.