The Conversation Nobody Wants to Start

You meet someone at a party. You get along, you make out, you do the whole next-day thing—coffee, a film, wherever it leads—and then you end up in bed together and everything is going exactly right until suddenly it isn’t. Until your face does the thing faces do involuntarily, and the only word forming in your head is fish market.

Director Todd Strauss-Schulson made a short film about exactly this. Big Pussy follows a guy who has to figure out how to tell the woman he’s falling for that something is, biologically speaking, off. He consults his friends. He tries to be tactful about it. Things don’t go the way he planned. The film handles a subject almost nobody wants to touch with enough genuine warmth for everyone involved that it ends up sweet rather than cruel, which is the only register in which this material actually works.

What Strauss-Schulson gets right is that the problem was never really the smell. It’s the impossible geometry of caring about someone and having to say the thing they absolutely don’t want to hear. The best comedy lives in exactly that gap.