Trouble with Sex

It is difficult to express the anger I felt leaving the cinema after this film. Surely a simple script review would have revealed that the characters were non-existent, the dialogue banal and the film itself profoundly pointless. At one stage in the film one character accuses the other of replacing intimacy with sex. Is this (rather unoriginal) point the issue the film is trying to explore? If so it manages to contribute exactly nothing to our understanding of it. It seems to be straining towards the sort of European art house film which examines the nature of relationships in modern society. Yet it fails to create real characters or to engage meaningfully with its subject matter. Issues are briefly alluded to, such as one of the main character's previous failed relationship, and then dropped, without adding anything to our understanding of that character. Indeed the characters themselves seem nothing more than a collection of lines spoken, with nothing substantial or sustained at their core. At points in the film they do such things as unexplainedly walking out of a room during foreplay and not returning, seemingly because this is the kind of thing that characters do in the sort of film that this is desperately striving to be.

The list of things which annoyed me about this film are too long to fully elaborate on. However I feel special mention should be given to a scene where the female lead gives a rendition from start to finish of Crowded House's 'Fall at Your Feet'. Whilst the performance itself is perfectly pleasant, the scene contributes nothing to the films development and would have been cut by a director with a clearer idea of how to construct a film. It is emblematic of the films wider problem - it has neither the tightly constructed narrative necessary to qualify as a conventional romantic drama, nor the required level of intelligence or insight which would justify its ponderous depiction of the central relationship. Like this karaoke moment, it is indulgent, empty, and ultimately a waste of screen time.