When Will I Be Loved? | Review

Characters lose their edge once the script follies add up.

Commencing with an opening shower-scene in the same veins as American Beauty, this tale of fractured love in a misogynist, male-dominated world also makes reference to the moral decay between the sexes. With a self-masturbatory text, A Guy and Two Girls director James Toback unveils his candid look into a miniature cesspool of mind games which adults play.

Featured as a day in the life, the film initially shows off its New York couple in a set of parallel stories- they both hustle for a living, one gets money from a daddy and gets phone numbers from strangers and player number 2 hatches odd schemes to make a quick buck out of someone else’s money. With a supposed sophisticated premise, this film goes where another boldly film has already gone before with Indecent Proposal but its “screw me?, screw you!” discourse is much more about men behaving badly than women acting smarter. While the film gives a whole new meaning to “financial independence”, it certainly fails to initiate and instigate a more interesting discussion that could have propelled it into the forbidden more troublesome land of say a Labute’s In the Company of Men. Instead, Toback lightly discusses the notion of empowerment through sex, money and eventually, mind play but When Will I be Loved? sticks to the charted map that sees the exploration of a female character’s sexuality and Toback thematically installs and refers back to men wanting to screw, to get screwed and being screwed. Campbell’s exposure is used as a tactical tool versus the male gazer and the parting freeze-frame shot showing Neve Campbell ( The Company) with a knowing-wink in a bathroom mirror shot adds little insight to a thin character.

Even with the pointlessly placed gratuitous nakedness and a little dabbling into a girl-girl routine for the Wild Things fans in everyone, Campbell manages to deliver the type of articulate performance that though is little in size it doesn’t demean but rather empowers her – the type of performance that is missing from Ashley Judd’s career. Here, her character named Vera (as in the V in film noir vixen) exemplifies what a hustler is – more than the many film characters that feature pool sharks and Vegas high roller. Actor Frederick Weller ( The Shape of Things) has a knack at playing life’s biggest assholes; here he is rightly cast as a manipulator who gets manipulated. With a hip-hop track that germinates into a Beethoven-score, the nature of the camera and the film is more intimate. Toback is interested in confining the viewer to the philosophical street and apartment exchanges and to the showcased eroticism where the camera hovers around the film’s subjects in half-circular motions by way of Larry McConkey’s steadicam.

For those still scorned by Toback’s Black and White effort, there is a slight breeze of relief here even if there is a tiny spot reserved for talents of Mike Tyson and what he does best – which is not box but look and sound threatening. When Will I be Loved? is a controlled piece, precisely paced feature that that pits two men against a woman with varying results that concludes with a preposterous ending, you kind of wish that there could have been a little bit more space for development.

Rating 1.5 stars