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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In a beguiling new romance from a spiritual cousin to Preston Sturges, Cupid shoots a wobbly arrow up into the air.
Sep 1, 2000 | In "Love & Sex," Kate (Famke Janssen), a young magazine writer who's on her own after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend, slumps in her office cubicle after her boss has threatened to fire her. On her desk, we glimpse pictures of her cats (the patron saints of single women everywhere), but these aren't just ordinary snapshots: There are four of them, each one of a different feline, individually framed and measuring around 5-by-7 each -- They're more like actors' head shots than your typical kitty pics.
That's the kind of detail, made almost fantastical by witty exaggeration, that sets Valerie Breiman's beguiling "Love & Sex" apart from any other romantic comedy made in the past few years. This not-quite-a-debut (Breiman has directed two other films, 1989's "Going Overboard" and 1993's "Bikini Squad") has none of the paint-by-numbers torpidity of Nora Ephron's work ("Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail"), which, sadly, has set the standard for the genre over the past decade or so.
Breiman is a spiritual cousin to Preston Sturges: She's nowhere near as freewheeling, unhinged and maniacally brilliant, but she does have a taste for the absurd, and an understanding of the notion that almost everything else in the world makes more sense than love.
At the beginning of "Love & Sex," Kate's boss, an egomaniacal magazine editor played with relish by Ann Magnuson, expresses dismay that Kate has turned in an article on blow jobs as a cure for depression. Kate's defense is that blow jobs are just about the only thing she understands about relationships, but her editor sends her back to write something more upbeat, or she's fired.
Love & Sex Trailer
When she sits down to rewrite the story by rambling into a tape recorder, we think we're going to get a litany of years' worth of lousy boyfriends and first dates gone wrong, and that is part of it. Kate doesn't lack for unsuitable suitors. As Janssen plays her (terrifically), Kate, with her disheveled hair and chic-sloppy clothes, looks like the kind of unassuming beauty who just can't hold anything together, who attracts so many clusters of men that the right ones sometimes find themselves stuck on the outside, like lost planets that can't get close enough to the sun.
But most of the story involves Kate's relationship with an idiosyncratic painter named Adam (Jon Favreau, from "Swingers") and the aftermath of their breakup. Kate and Adam meet when she shows up at his art opening with a self-involved loser she's dating, and their attraction is clear from the start. But from the beginning his behavior is the sort of thing that sets off warning bells for any single girl, potentially speaking of insurmountable insecurities and an insatiable craving for attention.
He practically kidnaps Kate from the arms of her (admittedly all wrong) date. Later, when they go out for a bite to eat, he comments on her "E.T. fingers," moving on to note how tree-frog-like they are, and from there to ascertain her shoe size. Women's size 11?" he asks incredulously, agog, as Kate fairly folds herself up in embarrassment. It's a type of teasing that may or may not be devastatingly hostile at its roots, the kind of thing that many single women (and probably many men) learn to be wary of, if they're smart.
At this point in the story, we can't read Adam's character any better than Kate can; we feel protective of her because we see she's beginning to like him in spite of herself -- but what's harder to accept is that maybe we are, too, even though we have no evidence that he's not a complete jerk.
