Just a Kiss | Review

Satirical comedy about the unfaithful is- far from compelling.

Can one kiss change the course of lives for a bunch of city-dwellers? I know that it certainly has in my case but what occurs in Fisher Stevens directorial debut goes way beyond the normal flow of events-welcome to the absurd, the bizarre and the banal of how people ‘get’ together all neatly tied together thru a palate of episodic crayon-coloured spliced sequences commencing and ending each skit with a down graded version of the visual artwork in Linklater’s Waking Life.

Steven’s gives us a film about infidelity and betrayal and the most complicated and simply bizarre love triangle all to the power of 6. The characters, the scenes, the conversations and the kisses are boxed into the a bunch of straightforward sequences that frame on the heavy and snotty dialogue between a male vs. female cast of ‘players’ -as in the slang term: player-which signifies a person or people who are more open than a 7-11 to the possibility of relations with the opposite sex. The cast-a bunch of recognizable supporting actors from films you can’t name headline this low-budget feature with the radiant exception of a performance from Marisa Tomei a vixen-esque type creature oozing with an evil streak which is covered up by her girl next door good looks and her inconspicuous jobs as a nurse and a bowling alley attendant.

Patrick Breen’s screenplay focuses on this rampant and oddly-consequential chain of adulterous affairs that lead up to a couple of disagreements, break-ups and maybe a spoiler here….deaths-the only problem is that this mindless fun with Stevens at the helm turns into an overindulgent string of silly and improbable sketches that give no backbone to the full scope of the film. Not that this oeuvre is a bunch of tripe, “I love beginnings, cuz in the beginning anything can happen”, oddly enough the film commences with an interesting arch set-up with the “moment in time that changes all” beginning and is followed up by two memorable sequences, the revelation scene that includes a hyper-undersized cell-phone and three surprised people in a phone chattering rotation and continues with the defiant of a young man showing his ‘true’ character. But the general clutter of the film-a bunch of full circle and semi-circle flashbacks in time are not the ingenuous device that it is made out to be and even more confusing is the rewinding of the entire film- (it actually is a rewinding of the film) ending that not only voids 95% of the previous picture put gives us another ending that proves that just a kiss can really make a change-and to that notion I say ‘who cares?”. Just a Kiss is a film that depends entirely too much on a sharply tongued dialogue giving off a stench of comedic talk overkill and the irrelevant and unfunny narrative chain of events-perhaps my sense of humour was underdeveloped or out of touch for the viewing, but I couldn’t help but wonder how much time I was wasting seating through the entire piece.

MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL

Rating 1.5 stars