Jenny Slate unloads a pretty great zinger about Helen Hunt’s “front wedgie” in the new film Landline. Of course, here in real life, there’s a not terrible chance that Ms. Slate will bump into the Mad About You star at some point in the future. What’s her plan for that? “I don’t know!” answers Slate, a touch of panic in her voice, during a call to the Georgia Straight from Mon­treal. “Hopefully, she’ll understand that we’re just commenting on the sort of general fashion of the time and not anything… deeper. I mean, everybody had major camel toe in the ’90s. I had one in the movie, ya know? You can’t avoid it.”

Period style happens to provide one of the incidental delights in the Manhattan-set film, opening Friday (August 11), the second collaboration between Slate and writer-director Gillian Robespierre, after 2014’s breakout hit Obvious Child. She insists that she actually felt “very comfortable in those ’90s fashions”, but if the army boots and Elaine Benes hair went on easily enough, Slate’s character, Dana, required a bit more tailoring. Not uncharacteristically for the former SNL cast member, Slate demonstrates an inspiring lack of inhibition as she chows down on mannerisms like the über-square Dana’s horsey laugh.

“I’m really tired of women who are quote unquote dorks but are actually pretty cool,” she says. “Dana’s not that cool. You don’t watch this movie and think, ‘Maybe I’d like to hang out with Dana.’ ” By the same token, Slate succeeds in making us care about a faintly irritating woman who—mirroring a situation with her father, played by an especially warm John Turturro—enters into a doomed affair with an old college flame.

“I’m not at all like my character, but I feel so deeply for the way that she’s trying to use her voice, and I feel so gentle towards the way in which she feels silenced and unsure and doesn’t know how to deal with her new feelings of doubt,” explains the actor. “Female identity, especially under patriarchy, is always pushed into this completely untenable, unsustainable zone of clearly defining yourself and never changing, especially if you’re in a partnership. Whoever you said you were to that man or woman when you entered into that partnership, you gotta keep being that person, and you gotta keep it up as if it’s a contract. And it’s just not the way that humans are. It’s so sad when someone is trapped in that space, because it’s suffocating. I have a lot of empathy for that.

“I felt a little bit nervous that she wouldn’t feel sad enough for what she had done,” Slate continues, “and then I realized that I was not interested in seeing Dana be contrite. I was more interested in seeing her come through her experience and kind of winning her freedom. Her freedom means, to me, that she’s a woman who knows that she’s allowed to ask questions. That’s why she got in trouble in the first place, and she ends up sort of victorious in the end in that she’s free.”

Georgia Straight, August 2017