If you took the more reasonable renters in Auberge Espagnol and threw them into an experimental, contemporary French New Wave-like format, you’d get Alexis Dos Santos’ latest exploration of youth culture whom are not aimless, but searching for more than just a space but rather, a sense of belonging. The Argentinean filmmaker desperately tries to impart that familiar feeling of being befriended and socially accepted among strangers, but it is a lack of maturity, not from the filmmaker but the script itself that makes Unmade Beds a visual commentary on the lifestyle, rather than a film where characters converge, narratives get thicker, and where results don’t come across as haphazard, but instead, well sewn together.
Like all major cities that clogged up by an influx of foreigners, London attracts its fair share of impressionable young squatters who symbolically pitch up tent for a while. One might think that with a title such as Unmade Beds we’d see a characters roll out of one bed and onto new partners and from one storyline into the next, but this is no bed-hopping expedition scenario. Exploring themes of attachment and abandonment, Dos Santos keeps his co-leads at a distance from one another, splitting the so-called narrative into how a teenage-looking Spaniard goes about in finding his Brit father, and a young girl’s need to get physically be close with members of the opposite sex without the emotional attachment.
Without enough direction, script and dialogue to form their characters, young Euro actors Fernando Tielve and Deborah Francois have difficulty getting a foothold on Dos Santos’ abstract vision for the characters. They stick out like a sore thumb, especially in the film’s handheld aestheticism which only reminds the viewer that specific scenes (such as loft parties with high levels of intoxication, or a party sequence featuring man on man smooching to an ever changing bunch of records) are highly improvised and distracting to the overall tone.
Keeping the parallel story-lines apart until it is too late, the most frustrating aspect is that Dos Santos never finds a need to converge his leads, and when he does the balloons are deflated and the music has stopped. Perhaps if the director of Glue (his debut film which also focuses on youth culture) spent less time in front of the camera and invested more time figuring out why this time, feeling and place is so special, then we’d have more to look forward to instead of what the filmmaker is prolific in, which is style. Freeze frames with commentary, some eye candy moments with title cards and such, and a blazing mixed-tape type of soundtrack, makes Unmade Beds accessible, but as a whole it comes across as a project that is too dependent on music to elicit emotions, and too much of an empty vessel to care for 90 plus minutes.
Review at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival on January 16th.
