''Welcome to L.A, embrace the pain.''
Alex Holdridge's In Search of a Midnight Kiss, from his own screenplay, regards démodé downtown Los Angeles with the same fiercely lyrical affection Woody Allen has lavished on Manhattan over the decades. This alone would make the film strikingly original, but in addition, its tempestuous love story, with its heartbreaking complications, is well served by a cast of comparative unknowns. This talented assemblage is headed by Scoot McNairy as Wilson, the director's alter ego, and Sara Simmonds as Vivian, the Diane Keaton-type: the salty-tongued blind date who leads Wilson on a wild frolic across the well-worn streets of a part of Los Angeles that has known better days and years and decades.
If Holdridge belongs to any school of filmmaking, it is the Austin, Texas, school of Richard Linklater, the Linklater of Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Suburbia, and Before Sunset. Linklater's and Holdridge's are the types of romantic comedies that can spend an entire film on a single date, as if a chance encounter can change one's whole existence, which often, if not always, happens in real life as well.
Where Holdridge differs most decisively from Linklater is in the comparative foulness of today's youthspeak, though our male protagonist, Wilson, is 29, and Vivian, his stormy blind date, is 27. Whether all the profanity represents an increasingly widespread lewdness of speech in the young, or, simply, a more permissive atmosphere for a filmmaker, particularly an independent filmmaker, I cannot say.
Fortunately, all the bad words are not merely camouflage for unintelligent dialogue. Quite the contrary. The talk in Midnight Kiss is uncommonly bright and realistic, a fact that gives me renewed hope for the future of so-called independent cinema.
The film is set on New Year's Eve, already an absurdity in sunny Los Angeles. It has been a miserable occasion for Wilson over the past six years. He has become so desperate for a meaningful midnight kiss that he has been reduced to masturbating in front of a nude photoshopped photo of his best friend's girlfriend, Min (Katie Luong). What's worse: He's caught doing it by his roommate and friend, Jake (Brian Matthew McGuire), who proceeds to ask Min out of mild curiosity if that is indeed a picture of her. After looking at the photo with mock thoughtfulness for a few moments, she answers in the negative, though it is obviously her face. The important thing is that everyone remains cool about the situation, though Wilson, as is his wont, remains flustered in general.
When I was in high school, someone told me that only 5 percent of the students masturbated, and the other 95 lied about it, and I have accepted these figures as gospel ever since. Yet films have seldom approached this practice except in the fringe exploitation genres. Even when we confront 40-year-old virgins of either gender, films refuse to show them compensating for the lack of a sexual partner. There is lasting shame involved in this spectacle. So, in a sense, Holdridge has started his protagonist off on an embarrassing note, and yet manages to save the character, and actually develop him into a quasi-heroic stoic navigating the treacherous shoals of deception and infidelity.
Robert Murphy expertly photographed the somber ruins of a once vital downtown Los Angeles with many dazzlingly varied perspectives. Murphy also joins the cast as Vivian's insanely jealous ex-boyfriend, Jack, whom Vivian caught cheating on her with another woman, and was thus receptive to Wilson's personal ad on Craigslist. Wilson had been virtually bulldozed into placing the ad by a helpful Jake in the aftermath of the masturbation fiasco.
At their first meeting, Vivian starts things off unpromisingly by asking Wilson to sit at another table while she interviews a speed-dating applicant waiting patiently. The logistics here don't make much sense, but the sheer outrageousness of Vivian and the situation is funny enough to make us forgive any lapses of logic and probability. In any event, the temporary delay in the meeting of Vivian and Wilson ends quickly in Vivian's somewhat cruel dismissal of a well-meaning lug who gains our sympathy by his abject need for encouragement in the game of love.
Before Wilson receives his long awaited midnight kiss, the narrative unleashes two wild twists, which, for a change, I'm not going to give away. These make the film both sadder and wiser. In Search of a Midnight Kiss overcomes patches of overwriting to end up as a film well worth watching, and Alex Holdridge as a writer-director to be remembered for future reference.
Holdridge's gift as a director resides in his conflation of the mundane and the somewhat profound. He's obviously been on some first dates and knows the way a good - no, miraculous - one can wend its way into adventure. In the real world, that transformation takes a few nights and days. In romantic comedy, 24 hours will do. But even as romantic comedy, Midnight Kiss moves sideways. It's a work of old-school, black and white American independent filmmaking that falls somewhere between Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise and Kevin Smith's Clerks - not just because of the lack of both colour and money, but because its maker, on the one hand, exults in the atmospherically rich oddness of romantic possibility, and on the other, finds certain types of crudeness really funny. What I think makes this kind of films (John Carney's Once would fit here too) essential is the fact that it inspires and encourages hundreds of aspiring filmmakers like myself. And I like to think at least 5 percent of us will have stopped being aspiring in a few years.
The quick symphony of locked lips that opens the film while Wilson introduces himself is, as everyone's figured out, a hat-tip to Manhattan. But Holdridge appears to have already figured out how to pay deeper, subtler tribute to Allen. A dual sequence in which Wilson and Vivian take the subway or another in which they stop for lunch are far more fun to watch. The film and its smart observations occasionally threaten to get away, never more so than when the phone rings - it's Vivian's brand-new ex-boyfriend, who seems as unstable as she sometimes does. He threatens to burn some of her stuff, and you're scared he'll take the rest of the film with it.
But he doesn't. Holdridge gets a lot of mileage out of charm. His two stars are incredibly likable and that, in a film like this, is essential. McNairy seems incurably lonely and resembles other forlorn-looking guys, like screenwriter and actor Mike White and Andy Warhol actor Taylor Mead. He doesn't have much of a screen presence, but as the film spins into full-blown craziness, McNairy's sadness suddenly has a point: That long face becomes an anchor of sanity. Simmonds, meanwhile, is a captivating species of actor. She's Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson merged in one, a whiff of craziness, and some real struggle in her face. You're not sure you like her, in the same way that Wilson isn't sure he does. For a while, it looks as if she'll shove the film into other Manhattan territory: Martin Scorsese's comedy of bad-date surrealism, After Hours. But Midnight Kiss is a less ambitiously cruel film, and its fantastic ending (with Scorpions' "Wind of Change" popping in the soundtrack) leaves you with a strange feeling of hope.
The film is, in the end, a far cry from the comedies of inarticulation and inaction that have won a backhanded video-story shelf. In Search of a Midnight Kiss is actually not about the chronically depressed and self-loathing, it's about active souls. The films gives us two transplants to Los Angeles who discover the city's underpopulated splendours while discovering each other. That they do most of this on foot constitutes a major leap of imagination. This is the rare film about the start of something interesting that happens to look a lot like the end of the world. And it feels so good.
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