The biggest sex organ in the body it is said, rightly I think, lies not between the legs but between the ears. We have sex with a body – we make love to a person. To make contact with a person is to connect with a mind, for we are what we think, what we say, and what we value. It takes effort, understanding, empathy and not a little trust to make contact with another mind. You have to learn to give as well as take, indeed to share. As essential for good sex as for good relationships perhaps.
This funny, resonant little monochrome Indie film from the States is set amongst the ‘cut-to-the-chase’ generation in Los Angeles. It is New Year’s Eve and the neat plot device is trying to find a girl to kiss at midnight. This enterprise is made difficult because of the premise implied by contemporary youthful mores that the kiss at midnight must be followed by a New Year’s sexual congress. It’s all in the cultural context: this is a generation who have de-mystified sex and de-bunked their parents’ fears about it so comprehensively that having sex with someone seems to fit on a scale somewhere between having a drink and telling them your name. Sex seen as an activity into which AIDS has not only injected justified anxiety but also an etiquette of sensible preparedness with both sexes carrying condoms as a matter of common sense maturity inimical to any sense of spontanaeity. A culture ruled by clichés: that every man always wants it; and every girl is always up for it. All this ‘normalisation’ of sex appears to be at the expense of anything approaching intimacy. If the absence of true intimacy is a loss, how much more so is the extraordinary enhancement it can give to sexual satisfaction and pleasure? Unfair generalisation though it is, one sometimes fears that the cut-to-the-chase generation know everything about how to have sex at the expense of any real depth of understanding as to why.
It is to Alex Holdridge’s enormous credit that he somehow spins a touching, affecting romance out of this implacably unsentimental, unpromising ethos. Echoes of Before Sunrise struggle through the brutalisation of relationships that has occurred since that delightfully romantic movie first engaged us in 1995. Part of that brutalisation has to do with the systematic destruction of anything resembling personal privacy in the name of a peer group imposed – letting it all hang out. So when Wilson (Scoot McNairy) ‘photoshop’s’ the head of his flatmate Jacob’s (Brian McGuire) girlfriend Min (Kathleen Luong) onto a soft porn picture and is then caught masturbating over the result – it is played for laughs. Our discomfort is only partially allayed by the matter of fact way Jacob reacts and the fact that Min regards it as a compliment. "How cool is that?" seems to be the message.
And yet – we also identify with Wilson’s mortification which echoes our own discomfort that this is at best a cheap laugh and immediately makes us warm to him in that his embarrassment and discomfort at least reflects that he is a little ashamed, not at doing it, but at being caught doing it. His reaction, in contrast with Jacob and Min’s, suggests that this was and should have remained, a private matter and we instinctively warm to him because we both agree with him and sympathise with his embarrassment.
Having come to LA to try to be a writer, Wilson is grieving the consequent loss if his home-town girlfriend and bemoaning his lack of success in the ‘getting laid’ department. Jacob and Min persuade him to take the modern approach to this – put out on the internet. Signing himself as ‘Misanthrope’ one response is from Vivian (Sarah Simmonds). Their subsequent café meeting resembles more an interview for The Apprentice than the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Wilson’s inadequacies are put under Viv’s implacable sexual microscope while the next candidate hovers in the wings. The playing and the dialogue here is witty and delightfully unsentimental. Eventually rejoining him and giving him a demeaning 6.pm deadline to impress, we feel Wilson’s insecurity at appearing to be the best of a bad lot and having been successful only under sufferance.
Holdridge’s gritty, grainy monochrome fits perfectly the urban edginess of city life. And as Viv and Wilson spend more time together we see them engaged in an entertaining, at times very funny, battle of sexual mores and modern attitudes. Their gradual engagement with one another struggles to survive the bluntness and crudeness of much current language of sex. Wilson challenges Viv as to whether she “prepped” herself by shaving her pubic hair before meeting him. Given the location of the film we should be grateful that this conversation did not get any more specific. Thankfully it is left to our imaginations whether we are in South America or Hollywood itself. Later in a hilarious comedy of manners, Viv is outraged to find that Wilson has 5 condoms in his pockets. With some justice he ripostes that he was showing respect and concern for her by coming prepared, so to speak. She affects to be outraged that he assumed they’d have sex five times. Guys will immediately recognise this as one of those absolutely no-win traps we know are ever-lying-in-wait, but we never manage to avoid: e.g. having just one condom would have been equally insulting but in a different way. In a frantic effort to rescue his good name and intentions poor, hapless Wilson’s instinct for emotional suicide provokes the priceless kamikaze comment that he brought the condoms because he didn’t “want her to think of herself of a slag.” All right ladies, I know, only a man could compound the offence of thinking this with the stupidity to actually say it out loud.
Only Wilson’s endearing, vulnerable, ‘I’m totally out of my depth here’ cosmic ineptitude carries him through. We keep rooting for him and good old Viv forgives him. A little excitement with a threatening red-neck boy friend, a disconcerting, badly timed ‘come-on’ from Min and we eventually find the old year being seen out in a way that both warms the heart and belies the surface ugliness of some of went before.
In the end, with a beguiling artfulness, Holdridge has perhaps given us a perfect illustration of the fragility and vulnerability of young people’s actual relationships: much blunt, often ugly, frequently obscene talking about sex predominates over actually having it. Wilson and Vivian in sounding like, and talking like, a cut-to-the-chase couple, actually do get to know each other; get to share confidences and trust, to become people to one another so that making love becomes a deeper more satisfying possibility than the New Year’s Eve quickie they started out by lining up.
Holdridge even has great fun with the problems of ‘truthfulness’ in a very new relationship. I guess most men in the audience start feeling uneasy when the newly-mets agree to swap ‘confessions’ as a mark of trust. Feelings that become acute when Wilson insists on going first. And when to our collective masculine horror we realise that he is going to talk about his onanistic overtures to his flatmate’s girlfriend one can almost feel, building to a crescendo in the cinema the masculine silent scream of “NOOOOooooooooo!” But of course dramatically this stupefying misjudgement sets up another run of smart, edgy, dialogue as Vivian’s developing feelings for him put even this into perspective. That Viv’s own belated confession is both traditional, poignant and touching, takes nothing away from Holdridge’s successful and satisfying completion of this funny, likeable first-time feature, played beautifully by its unknown cast. A good night out and one leaving a few thoughts still kicking around in the head on the way home. It gives the lie to Wilson’s remark “I think Los Angeles is where love comes to die.”
Another top-notch review, Zettel. Now that I'm a strict non-cinema goer I rely entirely on you to know what the rest of society is up to.
Thanks, Rod.
Thanks Rod.
Shame about the self-imposed cinematic purdah though. Surely you can allow yourself the occasional dispensation?
regards
Z
Couldn't stand Before/After Sunset/Sunrise, Zettel. Self-indulgent twaddle! SO I don't think I'' be queuing up to see this either. I dunno, is it an age thing? I AM going to see Straight Story - for about the third time, with a LIVE soundtrack on Wednesday. Much more up my street!
Hey Jem you pays your money......
Do you mean the David Lynch movie with the guy on the tractor. Love that movie, Best thing lynch ever did I think. But if its a live soundtrack maybe its a different film?
regards
Z
Yes, Zettel - the very same! You may remember the music is one of the many things that makes it so good. There is a group of musicians who are touring Picturehouse cinemas and apparently the last tour they did they played the soundtrack to Belleville Rendezvous. You can imagine how brilliant that film would be to live music because, again, the music is part of what sells that film to me.
Apparently that tour was a sell out so I'm hoping this is going to be as good.
I love the music to The Assassination of Jesse James! My son has downloaded it and I often listen to it when I'm pottering about.
Hey Jem
I do so agree about the music in AJJ. In fact there's a pretty good soundtrack to the Afflecks' new movie Gone Baby Gone. Why even MIdnight Kiss has some good music!
Every time I see a movie with music I want to follow-up on I get frustrated at the stupid way they put in the credit roll. First it's right at the end. Then the peformer's name is lost amidst a mountain of verbiage and not made prominent in any way. As I guess selling music from themovie is the next big income stream it always seems so stupid to mess this promotion up so badly.
regards - enjoy the SS - er no initials don't work there do they!
Z
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