A Revry original, Unconventional is a really well-liked queer dramedy that feels totally different from the usual stuff. The heart of the story is about two pretty eccentric queer siblings and their partners trying to build a family that doesn't follow the traditional rules. It takes a super raw and unfiltered look at queer life, diving deep into things like mental health, addiction, and how complicated identity and relationships can get. It’s not afraid to get messy or show people at their most vulnerable, and it really pushes boundaries while showing a lot of different queer experiences. The first season has nine episodes, and each one is about a half-hour long. The story centers on Noah, a grad student who’s been struggling for years to wrap up his PhD. He’s been with his husband, Dan, for nine years, and they’ve recently gotten married and moved to Palm Springs. While they're trying to figure out how to start a family and have a baby, they decide to shake things up by in...
Two chimney sweeps, both in monogamous, heterosexual marriages, find themselves in situations that challenge their perspectives on sexuality and gender norms. One of them has been having a series of dreams in which he is in a passionate relationship with David Bowie who makes him feel like a woman, while the other recently had a sexual encounter with a male client, an unexpected but surprisingly wonderful experience, which gets tarnished as soon as he tells his wife about it. Neither considers himself to be homosexual, but they find themselves slowly questioning their identity as time goes on. The film then continues to focus on how the second guys wife reacts to his husband cheating. He copes with his wife’s intense emotional reaction to an event that he sees as an unexpected blip and they are both chocked by what happened. The story if the first guy is a bit all over the place and doesn't get a proper conclusion. He seems to fall back on cliches that the film can’t entirely explore because he himself doesn’t know how to recognize the heteronormative standards he’s judging himself by.
The two protagonists question their sexual identity and come to terms with their own deviances and the impact these have on their lives going forward. The film is also about how the men’s perspectives on themselves shift because of these events and how their family reacts to them. When the guy tells his friend about the event with another man, he just thinks as a one off thing, no biggie. As soon as his wife responds to the news, he becomes crestfallen because his actions hurt her, and she can’t get past it. And the two get into many conversations on what this really means for both of them, which I thought was interesting but after a while gets to much. It goes into the realm of "There can be sex without intimacy, intimacy without commitment, and not-at-all intimate sex". The other friend's story was a little arbitrary to me and I just couldn't connect with it. The Bowie dream becomes a recurring part of his sleep, but rather than waking up feeling uneasy, he begins to take pleasure in the sensation of being looked at as a woman. I read that the film has a deeper meaning especially with the parallels of sprawling city landscapes, but none of that mattered to me. I wanted to feel, how as a film it makes me feel, and I think it was just average. (4/10)
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