In Search of a Midnight Kiss
A fairly standard issue indie rom-com (probably could have guessed that from the title), featuring that favourite subject of struggling writers and actors (struggling writers and actors), and set over 24 hours at New Year in Los Angeles.
It starts shakily, with some unsteady acting and excess plotting, but grows more endearing as it continues, even if (or more likely, because) it doesn’t really go anywhere. It flits from broad brush explicit humour, to ambling first blush rom-com, to serious grown-up relationship angst – perhaps to it’s credit that it manages this fairly coherently.
It’s going for that ‘microcosm of twentysomething experience’, with an offbeat humour (that’s a terrible way to phrase it) that stops it from piling up behind the more angsty moments – undercutting, informing. Off-kilter, perhaps, although that’s perhaps to fussy – it’s not unconventional, merely pert enough not to think the angst is more realistic than the comedy.
It does have a strong visual flair, particularly as the central couple wander LA in the ‘getting to know you’ section. The film’s crisp black & white photography lends character to the city – possibly unwarranted character, trying to give a little 70′s New York decay to LA’s bland sprawl, but even if it’s faked, it adds an interesting dimension to the fairly conventional action. A sequence of stills following the girl’s revelation that she has a website of photos of lost shoes shows a real eye for an image.
That idea, and the initial premise that has the protagonist post a lonely hearts ad on Craigslist on New Years Eve (“Misanthrope seeks misanthrope”), suggest that the film intends to use the vagaries of splitting life on- and off-line, but it’s never really taken anywhere, other than to shore up the possible infidelity of the protagonist’s friends girlfriend. (The one they walk in on him masturbating to a Photoshopped image of) (Did I not mention that?)
That incident sets up the second act rom-com rift between the protagonist and the girl who answers his ad, when they swear to reveal a secret to each other – he tells her about this and she, not entirely surprisingly, walks off in disgust. Her secret, told when they’re reconciled, is, inevitably, that she’s pregnant by the irate boyfriend she’s just left. That it manages to use more than the broad comedy to draw you in, gradually turning the characters into more rounded characters – the protagonist not simply navel-gazing depressed failed writer, the girl opening up into more than the standard issue flake she starts out as – means that you’re left with more than a fleeting impression of life in the edges of Hollywood. And the fact that the couple don’t end up together is all the more interesting – the film continues beyond the ‘midnight kiss’ of the title that an archetypal rom-com would stick with.
It reminds me of one of the first films I saw at the festival (can’t remember the name), with the same strong b&w photography and aimless wandering around in a not-quite-relationship – although it might be more appropriate to call it a combination of Swingers and Before Sunrise in it’s content.
I saw:
- 17/08/07, 4:30pm: In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Filmhouse 1 EIFF)
comment: