The best thing about Alex Holdridge’s In Search of a Midnight Kiss (trailer above) is its conceptual audacity: not only is it a film about walking in L.A., but it devotes much of its screen time to romanticizing corners and aspects of the city well-known to natives but rarely seen on film (and never as the backdrop for meet-cute one-night-stand cinema). As long as it sticks to being a visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city, an inverse of the L.A. segment of Annie Hall, a filmic rehab from City of Quartz to a city of romantic fantasy––I can totally get on board with it. It’s when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem.
Oh, there are other things to recommend this Before Sunrise update for the age of techno-cynicism. Its dreamy black-and-white cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and its resolution (or lack thereof) is refreshingly messy and kind of a downer. It doesn’t require its mostly unlikeable protagonists––a self-pitying screenwriter (Scoot McNairy) (and a blousy blonde basketcase (Sara Simmonds) whose mutual New Years Eve loneliness leads to a Craig’s List-enabled meetup, and whose mutual armors of affectation threaten to preclude a hookup––to become significantly Better People for the purpose of narrative convenience.
And then there are the demerits. The dialog tends to veer wildly between insipidly cute and unconvincingly “shocking,” and even giving allowances for the fact that the film made its festival debut at Tribeca 16 months ago, references to MySpace and Friendster seem outdated for its slice-of-hipster-life ambitions. And in order to buy the narrative leap that these two would actually spend a full day and night together after their inauspicious meeting, we have to assume that the male hero is not the person the film seems to say he is in its first thirty minutes––that, or he’s got a schizophrenia-inducing addiction to blonde damaged goods. Unfortunately, Nico complexes are best left to Philippe Garrell.
Perhaps because of my misgivings, I was a little surprised to see that Kiss is currently rocking a 94% percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In fact, a number of name critics have raved, including Andrew Sarris and Anthony Lane––both of whom would rarely even review a film this small unless it carried heftier thematic weight. That The New Yorker gave a Lane a full column for Kiss‘ consideration, a luxury usually only afforded to blockbusters and serious Oscar bait, is unheard of; of course, Lane uses the room to magically transform the film’s treatment of masturbation into a joke about “Onan the Barbarian.” Sarris also chose to focus on the scene where rudimentary Photoshop skills are put to the service of manual release; for the elder critic, the scene is itself a selling point, a correction to the fact that “movies have seldom approached this practice except in the fringe exploitation genres.” (I’ve already assigned Chris with the task of attempting to prove Sarris wrong on this count; he’ll present his findings by the end of the week.)
But actually, I think the more revealing excerpt from Sarris’ review is his parting shot: “[As] a critic, I have never presumed to be intellectually superior to ‘mere’ love stories in the cinema,” he writes. I think this ties into something we’re seeing this a lot lately: as the average, female-fronted Hollywood romantic comedy has become cookie-cutter to the point of toxicity, film critics seem to take great pleasure in championing relationship films with lower budgets and lower stakes, which allow for a riskier, more acidic, and often male-oriented twist on cinematic love. Kiss takes enough risks to elevate it above its “mere” genre, and those risks seem to be enough to seduce critics who would ordinarily need an excuse to take micro-budget romance seriously.
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