JUNO TEMPLE AND KATHRYN HAHN IN AFTERNOON DELIGHT

Not-quite-dolce far niente

"How dare any of us? Rachel, do I need to remind you how much time you spend giving back?" queries Rachel's complacent, stylishly bespectacled lady shrink Lenore (Jane Lynch, droll), after the too-idle Rahcel's dissed her own complaining given the woes of the women of Darfur. It's a signal moment in this somewhat lazy and self-indulgent study of a well-off suburban LA matron who hasn't enough to do, besides preschool auctions, lackluster sex, and a kaput career, and fills the void by the very unwise choice of trying to save a stripper. Soloway, who has worked much in TV, writes specific, sometimes funny dialogue (for the women in the film anyway), but has an uncertain sense of tone here, wavering from the naturalistic to the comical to, at the last minute, some serious drama. Mostly this is a sit-com with touches of vérité; it promises something more, but due both to undue absorption in its clued-in social delineations and lack of a strong plotline, it never delivers. Soloway's observant specificity ultimately comes across as chattering trivia. Come to think of it, that describes a lot of American TV. But not all TV, anyway, since in this case Soloway has managed to make a film full of contemporary mom talk whose explicit sex would be uncomfortable or distasteful for most moms.

The chatty, people-pleasing, annoyingly motor-mouthed Rachel is played by Kathryn Hahn (of Parks and Recreation, Crossing Jordan). Her husband Jeff (Josh Radnor, fine) is apps-rich; they have a small boy, Mason (Noah Kaye Bentley). Rachel is active aat the Jewish Community Center -- perhaps she's a repressed or hideously deformed version of an old-fashioned Jewish mother -- till all this happens: to liven up their sex life, or just out of desperate boredom on Rachel's part, Rachel and Jeff and another couple go to a strip club, where Rachel gets a private session from confident little blonde "sex worker" (as she later styles herself) 19-year-old (she says) McKenna (Juno Temple, convincing). After this even the still desperately bored Rachel starts stalking McKenna across from the strip club, meets up and chats with her a couple of times -- and when she finds her deprived of her car and a place to live, takes her home, later even takes her in as a nanny for her kid. Jeff disapproves, but perhaps likes having McKenna to ogle. Rachel decides to "save" McKenna (get this) by providing her with a blog, to "tell her story." All this, lo and behold, does revive Jeff and Rachel's sex life. But then sex invades their and Rachel's girlfriends' and fellow moms' lives via McKenna more than they'd planned for. Yet eventually Soloway settles for the unlikely fantasy that seriously messing up can renew a marriage and even a life.

This is the kind of little movie that may have enough to make it distinctive but not quite enough to make it memorable. It isn't a surprise that the secondary female characters are drawn more distinctly than the male ones. But this remains a women's picture that women won't much want to watch; Hahn is surprisingly annoying for a protagonist, by the way. Audience-focus problems.

Afternoon Delight, 99 mins., debuted at Sundance 2013, was also shown at the SFIFF. Originally screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Limited US theatrical release 30 August 2013. Metacritic rating: 44.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.