Love Building | Review

Faulty Blueprint: Rugina’s Debut Pleasures the Crowd, Numbs the Mind

A certifiable hit at the Romanian box office, Iulia Rugina’s directorial debut, Love Building has the formulaic, crowd pleasing prowess of similar Western counterparts where hokey endeavors are piled one on top of another until, instead of revealing its own realistic mess, we reach a staunchly uplifting and/or hopelessly trite finale. To her credit, Rugina doesn’t completely dissolve her narrative in saccharine fantasyland by ending on an open-ended sequence that doesn’t quite put the ribbon on the wrapped box, but neither is it operating as anything other than simplistic fluff. While it doesn’t neatly solve the many problems of its many characters, the film also fails to question its own complicity in these types of problems, namely that maybe our conditioned, heteronormative notions of love and successfully realistic relationships is the root of discord.

Love Building is a weeklong camp designed to help couples mend their broken or failing relationships. Fourteen couples are about to converge, with the program being run by three trainers who are supposed to assist the couples through various activities. Only, the three trainers all seem to be affected by their own personal relationships and problems, and one of them is convinced that the very notion of love isn’t real. While they hardly seem to be invested in helping their clientele, the camp is ultimately run by a slick talking businesswoman who expects results in order for the camp to get necessary publicity, which includes offering a lucrative prize to the “most successful couple.”

Love Building seems easily like the type of foreign language film studios love to remake, but it already feels naggingly similar to something like 2009’s Vince Vaughn starrer, Couples Retreat. And at least that film, co-written by Vaughn and Jon Favreau, had the good sense to minimize its couplings. Rugina tries to juggle fourteen couples plus the various issues of the three clueless counselors, and we’re treated to a breathless merry-go-round of people that are only defined by their problems instead of presented as actual characters. Likewise, they each conveniently seem to have only one definable problem.

The inclusion of two lesbian couples but no gay men also makes the film’s intent suspicious, as the lesbians seem more easily assimilated into the prized model of the heteronormative realm, i.e, the monogamous relationship (the problems experienced by the lesbian couples in question are alcoholism and prejudice, as in one of the ladies seems reluctant to identify as gay due to socially based repercussions). Rather than take any time to actually grapple with these issues, they’re stirred into the big pot of clips we see of all the couples, meant to be black and white documentary style snapshots as they speak directly to the counselors (and us) about their issues.

Since their number is easier to contain, we get more nuanced performances from the three camp counselors, each played by recognizable faces from the Romanian New Wave, including Porumboiu favorite Dragos Bucur (Police, Adjective), Dorian Boguta (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Alexandru Papadopol (Tales from the Golden Age), though their interactions with their boss (Silvia Morosanu, unfortunately quite wooden) feel extremely amateurish.

Because nothing seems well thought out, it’s short running time, mostly comprised of random snippets, Love Building feels and looks a bit rough around the edges, and you come to pity the poor, troubled saps that were fooled into thinking (and paying) for this hokey program to help rebuild their troubled relationships, even if the best therapy may indeed be witnessing firsthand that no one has ever experienced a perfect union. However, what we need less of is the continual reinforcement of relationship rhetoric like this that asserts what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Reviewed on December 1, 2013 for the 8th edition of Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema at the Film Society

★ 1/2 / ★★★★★