Filmmaker Barker found four very different losers-in-love in the personal ads and got to know them for months, writing a script based on their personalities and experiences. He then filmed it as if it were a traditional documentary, with the people playing themselves.
The characters are always interesting, if all sad, and often pathetic as well as pathetically funny.
Sometimes it feels exploitational – don't these people know how sad, and sometimes crazy they come off? Yet there's something that feels like these people consciously chose to be seen for who they were, warts and all. Better that than continue to exist in the lonely hole of obscurity.
And a simple visual touch at the very end puts a slightly more empathetic, less cruel spin on the film.
I couldn't quite love it, but I respect it's bravery in trying something new, its dark humor, and its unblinking eye. But I suspect an unmanipulated documentary might have been even more powerful. Here, we're never sure how deeply to hurt for these people, or how awful or cruel to feel at laughing at them, because we don't know when what we're seeing is 'true' – which makes for interesting debates about 'reality', but also creates a bit of emotional disconnect. But just a bit
The characters are always interesting, if all sad, and often pathetic as well as pathetically funny.
Sometimes it feels exploitational – don't these people know how sad, and sometimes crazy they come off? Yet there's something that feels like these people consciously chose to be seen for who they were, warts and all. Better that than continue to exist in the lonely hole of obscurity.
And a simple visual touch at the very end puts a slightly more empathetic, less cruel spin on the film.
I couldn't quite love it, but I respect it's bravery in trying something new, its dark humor, and its unblinking eye. But I suspect an unmanipulated documentary might have been even more powerful. Here, we're never sure how deeply to hurt for these people, or how awful or cruel to feel at laughing at them, because we don't know when what we're seeing is 'true' – which makes for interesting debates about 'reality', but also creates a bit of emotional disconnect. But just a bit