by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last Saturday’s “premiere” movie on Lifetime, Let’s Get Physical, which they re-ran at 2 yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t watched it last week because I wanted to watch RoboCop on Turner Classic Movies instead, and I hadn’t held out much hope for it because of its overall plot: a young woman named Sadie Smith (Jenna Dewan, who’s in excellent shape for her 41 years and is thoroughly believable as a high-end hooker) comes to the hidebound town of Luton, New Hampshire and opens Dazzle ‘n’ Spin, a dance and exercise studio, from which she also turns tricks on the side. I had thought this film would be so dreadful I could start making jokes like, “If Olivia Newton-John weren’t already dead, this movie would have killed her,” but in fact the movie turned out to be unexpectedly good. The main reason was the filmmakers, director Robin Hays and writers Margaret Froley and Kelly Fullerton (I’m presuming all three of these people are women, though Kelly Fujllerton’s imdb.com page doesn’t have a photo or list a gender), gave it a surprisingly light touch and avoided the heavy-duty moralism of Lifetime’s previous movie on this topic, 2010’s The Client List (which they showed right afterwards). The film starts with Sadie being arrested for prostitution and tax evasion in the middle of leading an exercise class in which she’s teaching, among other things, pole dancing. The raid is led by Daphne Bartlett (Malaika Jackson), a Black woman police officer (it’s all too typical of Lifetime that the only African-American female in the cast is a police officer rather than one of the girls!).
Then the film flashes back with a typical Lifetime chyron, “Five Months Earlier,” and five months earlier Sadie is newly arrived in Luton. She befriends April Macintosh (Jennifer Irwin), who runs a beauty salon next door to the space Sadie has just rented from the town’s mayor, Brian Kemp (Mar Andersons), who makes his non-political living as s realtor. Sadie moves into an apartment on the property of April and her husband Marty (Bradley Stryker, who’s definitely attractive and a couple of cuts above the usual sandy-haired, lanky type Lifetime generally casts as innocent husbands). We first learn that Sadie is running a side business when Mayor Kemp comes over to her place for a “massage,” and it’s clear – especially when sadie asks him to turn over and lie on his back on the tabie – what he’s really there for. Apparently Sadie jacked him off, because the next thing we see is Mayor Kemp blissfully smiling as he gets up from the table. Sadie racks up an interesting list of clients, including the town minister and a widower who hasn’t had sex at all in the eight years since his wife died. The film gives us a running tally of Sadie’s clientele in both ends of her business – the women who come in for exercise and the men for her alternate service – only Sadie gets into trouble from Carol Martin, owner and principal reporter for the Luton Gazette. Surprisingly, neither Lifetime’s own Web site nor indb.com lists who plays this character, even though a) she’s the villainess of the piece and b) she’s damned good.
Once Carol catches her 17-year-old son Ben (Seth Isaac Johnson) watching Sadie doing a live webcam in which she plays with her vagina and makes sexy comments, she’s determined to put Sadie out of business even though, when she first complains to the cops, the Black woman detective explains to her that there’s nothing illegal about adultery, doing live-streamed computer porn or anything short of out-and-out prostitution, which we know Sadie is donig but Carol does not. April Macintosh hears the sounds of sex coming from Sadie’s studio in her beauty shop next door, and eventually she rats Sadie out to the authorities after she becomes convinced her husband Marty is one of Sadie’s customers. When Sadie is finally busted – not only for prostitution but for tax evasion, which carries a mandatory prison sentence – Carol insists on printing the names of the various johns on Sadie’s client list despite April’s argument that she’ll just hurt people and destroy lives and marriages by doing so. The name “M. Macintosh” is on the second tranche of names Carol publishes, and April immediately assumes that’s Marty and he cheated on her (oops, had extra-relational activities) with the town whore – only it turns out, after April has already thrown Marty out of their home and literally ruh over his belongings with her car, that the “M. Macintosh” on Sadie’s list wasn’t Marty but his sister Marcia (Eliza Norbury). Apparently Marcia was what in the common parlance of the Queer community is called “questioning” – that is, wondering whether or not she might be Gay. She hired Sadie for a Lesbian tryst to find out for sure, and she had such a great time with Sadie she came out once and for all.
In the end Sadie draws a one-year jail sentence but April is there to meet her when she’s released, and the two of them agree that Sadie really shook up Luton. Among other things, she enlivened up several of the town’s marriages because Sadie’s exercises made the women more comfortable in bed and more sexually aggressive towards their husbands, and even the guys who tricked with Sadie one time learned more about their own sexuality and became better partners towards their wives. While I was watching the film I thought of my friend, the late Lesbian activist Gloria Johnson, and the arguments she used to get into with fellow feminists who bought into the standard conception of prostitution as a loathsome business that destroys the self-respect of anyone who engages in it. Gloria Johnson was very much in favor of making prostitution legal, and I couldn’t help but think of her,especially in the scene in which April is protesting to Sadie that what she’s doing is illegal, and Sadie says, “It shouldn’t be.” About the last place I would expect to hear the case for legalizing proistitution made is in the script for a Lifetime movie – most depictions of the Oldest Profession on Lifetime describe its practitioners as human trafficking victims who’ve been kidnapped or psychologically forced into it by vicious pimps (and of course such people exist in the real world, too!), but Let’s Get Physical argues that sex work can be a life-affirming choice for those who engage in it voluntarily and unashamedly.
