Ben implies, falsely, that he and his wife have an "open" relationship, and that she'll be fine with it. "It breaks boundaries," he exults, "and that's what good art should do." Feeling his inner bohemian bursting free, Ben places a call to reserve a cheap motel room for the shoot.Īndrew wonders what Anna will make of this. In fact, he says, maybe he and Ben should be the performers. Andrew is of the opinion that amateur porn is an avant-garde art form and that the most radical exploration of it would be a film of two straight men having gay sex. The conversation eventually turns to sex - in particular, the upcoming HUMP! festival, an annual amateur-porn competition sponsored by The Stranger, Seattle's long-running alternative weekly. Ben, who's left Anna at home, is enthralled by the easy-going bohemianism on display at this little bash - the pot-smoking, the cello-playing, the endless art talk. Anna is alarmed by Andrew's sudden, gabby presence but agrees to let him stay.Īndrew quickly makes friends on the local art scene, and he soon lures Ben to a party being thrown by a bisexual bon vivant named Monica (played by Shelton) and a cute lesbian named Lily (Trina Willard), who fulfills the Sapphic side of Monica's nature. Andrew's been out of touch for a while (working on another "project" in Mexico), but when he shows up at Ben and Anna's door late one night looking for a place to crash, the two men fall right back into arrested adolescence. Ben and Andrew are old friends with an ostentatiously intense bond. Andrew is a free-as-a-breeze "artist" who has yet to create any art. Ben is a Seattle transportation planner - a settled-down slacker - who's living an idyllic white-picket-fence life with his wife, Anna (Alycia Delmore). If only thought-stirring were all we wanted from a movie.Įssentially, Shelton's two protagonists, Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), seem clueless about who they really are on any level. If two straight guys decide to have sex together for an "art project," does that make them gay? Brave? Or just arty in a new and pathetically pretentious way? In "Humpday," director Lynn Shelton leaves those questions unresolved, which does stir thought.