Poly Movie Review - Kiss Me Again

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Kiss_Me_Again/70056690?trkid=496624 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436460/ - IMDB
http://amzn.to/2igH9mQ - Amazon

Well that was a surprise.

I just watched Kiss Me Again.  The Netflix summary says "Helmed by William Tyler Smith, this cautionary tale stars Jeremy London and Katheryn Winnick as liberal spouses trying to add zest to their sex life via a ménage à trois. When self-seeking college professor Julian (London) persuades his wife, Chalice (Winnick), to let lovely coed Elena (Mirelly Taylor) share their bed, the physical coupling leads to emotional repercussions."

This sounds like I should hate it.  It even says right in the summary "this cautionary tale".  So I was expecting the usual "sexy hot bi babe turns out to be psycho and destroys their relationship", or even "frigid wife reluctantly agrees to threesome and leaves hubby for hot lesbo".  Surprisingly, neither happened.

Julian and Chalice are a young, attractive, married couple with a wild and crazy bisexual roommate, Malika.  We know she's wild and crazy because she's A) bisexual and B) has lots of tattoos.  Malika has a long-time girlfriend, and one night she brings home a strange and creepy guy for a threesome with her and her girlfriend while the married couple sleep on the couch after an exciting night of pizza, wine, and rental classic movies.  During the night, each half of the couple gets up and stumbles past Malika's room, where they glimpse the hot threesome and stay for a bit of a lookie-loo.

The next day, Malika teases Julian about watching them the night before, and lets it slip that Chalice watched too, and she watched for longer.  So that plants the seed for Julian to begin thinking of hot bi babes and hot threesomes - hey, if Malika's relationship with her girlfriend can withstand casual sex and orgies, maybe there's something to it!  So Julian gets up the nerve to propose a threesome to Chalice, using all the standard "it'll be good for us" tripe.  Chalice immediately freaks out, offended, insulted, and condescending.  But then she talks it over with Malika, who implies that Chalice is just a sheltered, naive, little girl, which pricks Chalice's pride.  So she decides to have a threesome "for Julian", but really to prove to herself that she's not a sheltered, naive, little girl.

So they place a personals ad as a married couple looking for a hot bi FEMALE babe to experiment with.

Meanwhile, Julian is a young professor at a local university, where he is becoming known for stirring up trouble in his classes by *gasp* challenging his students to think.  One of his students, a woman named Elena, has a crush on him.  She invites him out for coffee, they flirt, and Julian discovers a growing interest in Elena.  One day, they meet in the park, they kiss, and then Julian backs away saying that it isn't right, he can't do this, and that's where things end.

Until Chalice agrees to a threesome.

Julian approaches Elena and asks her to pose as someone responding to their ad, pretending to have never met Julian before.  Julian rationalizes this by saying that if he wasn't married, he and Elena would probably be in a relationship right now anyway.  Elena wants Julian bad enough that she agrees.

So, the threesome is set up under somewhat false pretenses, everyone meets, everyone likes everyone else, everyone fucks.

It actually goes very smoothly.  Chalice wakes up in the morning without bad feelings, Julian is ecstatic, and Elena seems happy too.  But then things go downhill, as you knew they had to.

( As usual, in order to explain WHY I think it's poly, I have to give spoilers, including the ending )

So, I think this deserves to be on a poly-ish movie list for a few reasons.  One is that I see a lot of similarities between how these characters got into their mess and how a lot of couples flail around the poly community.  Another is that the characters had an emotional connection to their hot bi babe.  It may have started out as "just sex", but it became more about feelings and relationships - and Julian and Elena had their own emotional connection to each other before the threesome ever got proposed and Chalice and Elena develop their own emotional connection to each other.  And another is that, although this was billed as "a cautionary tale", I believe that it was left open for interpretation, and my interpretation of the movie was that of a more honest and open future for our characters.

These movies are so difficult to explain why I think they're poly without giving away the ending.  If you choose not to read the spoilers because you want to watch the movie and be surprised, know that I do have some movies on my poly-ish movie list that do not end happily-poly-ever-after, but they are on the list because they show polyamory of a sort in a positive, or at least honest, light.  This was one of those movies that I flip-flopped on whether or not I thought it was poly.  But after watching the whole thing, I do believe that there are definitely some poly elements in this film, and it might be cautionary in the sense that things can go horribly wrong, but I did not get the sense that this movie was yet another anti-poly-moralizing tale.  You could argue that some of the things the characters did are classic examples of What Not To Do, but that the moral of the story did not appear to be "non-monogamy is doomed to fail no matter what and here, watch this train wreck to see why".

So, bottom line - I'm keeping this on the list of poly-ish movies and I enjoyed watching it.  But be prepared to yell at the characters when they do things that we all know are dumb.