In a World

      The unseen world of film trailer voice-overs proves a fertile ground for replaying the  feminist revolt against male authority. For even in that arena, where the actors are disembodied, the male gender wields authority. That’s how pervasive patriarchal power is: It operates even without the body. Even when the body is irrelevant the advantage of maleness isn’t. 

In both the theatre and advertising worlds the voice-over actors are on the bottom rungs. They enjoy no celebrity outside their inner world, in part because their work is relatively simple, in part because they are unseen. And yet their rather sad little awards ceremony is as glitzy and pathetic as the big award shows and the industry’s political infighting and rivalries as bitter. As in the old joke about university politics, the passions run so heated because the stakes are so small.

Though the leading women are rather collections of quirks than characters, the film works because of the imaginative screenplay. One relationship is first broken, then recovered, through tape recordings. The voice business opens into the whole range of sexual tensions. Men are anxious/proud about the relative size of their...feet. In the culture of women’s sexual subordination the sexy little girl’s voice is overvalued -- to the detriment of the corporation lawyer’s plausibility. Sons are prized and daughters neglected. Having a woman narrate a new epic’s trailer is as radical as -- well, giving them the vote, or equal salaries, or senior economic positions, or indeed admitting them into any traditional preserve of male power. The epic film in the plot is a saga of Amazonian women ruling the globe -- it provokes laughs even in our audience.  

The male prerogative in free sex is neatly caught when the heroine’s father urges his studly young rival on to exploit his new conquest -- unaware the girl is the dolt’s daughter. The heroine’s secret admirer wins her by helping her defeat her father in the voice audition. That device, the young lovers against the cold oldies, is as old as Greek comedy. 

Essentially this is just another in the recent stream of comedies  -- Judd Apatow and spawn -- about young people postponing as long as possible their growing up into adult responsibilities. The film’s happy endings, with two families reunited and a third couple set, confirm the entire project’s conservative, safe spirit. But he voice-over context gives it some freshness. Still, as writer, director and lead actor Lake Bell proves a promising new talent -- even without Orson Welles’s stentorian voice and girth.