LOVE AND HUMAN REMAINS
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 1995 Christopher Null
There's a little bit for everybody in LOVE AND HUMAN REMAINS, but as a whole, most people are likely to find this film somewhat daunting. This study of modern relationships is billed as a "dark comedy"--and I'm still trying to determine whether the designation fits.
Following the interactions of seven side-wardly mobile Canadians, LOVE AND HUMAN REMAINS explores questions of love, misery, loneliness, confusion, and the strange truth that all seem to be inexplicably present at the same time. The reality of this has been the subject of numerous romantic comedies and the like, but I'm not sure I've ever seen the topic handled quite this way.
For one thing, these aren't your garden-variety characters. David (Thomas Gibson) is an ex-child actor turned waiter, recently accepting that he's gay. Candy (Ruth Marshall) is his roommate and ex-girlfriend, a book reviewer struggling with her own emotional needs. Benita (Mia Kirshner) is a psychic dominatrix friend of David's who earns a living by acting out the twisted fantasies of others. And it gets stranger than that--a lot stranger, in fact--to the point of tying in a subplot (the "human remains" part) about a serial killer who takes an earring from each of his victims.
The fragmented storytelling style used in the film make for some difficult to follow transitions, often a series of broken images which are hard to relate to on a deeper level than the surface. It ends up feeling more like an underground theatrical piece than a movie (the film is actually based on the screenwriter's (Brad Fraser) own play called "Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love"). Fraser says the film is based on actual events from his mid-20's. Scary.
Most of the acting is fair, and some of the comedy is good. Thomas Gibson has all the best lines, dryly expressing his cynicism better than I could ever hope to do. I'm still working on figuring out "the moral of the story" in the film, a question to which I may never find an answer. Then again, maybe that's the moral.
RATING: ***
\-------------------------------\ |* Unquestionably awful | |** Sub-par on many levels | |*** Average, hits and misses | |**** Good, memorable film | |***** Perfection | \-------------------------------\
-Christopher Null / null@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu -Movie Emporium (archives) / http://www.notes.tpoint.net/emporium/ -Contributing Editor, FEEDBACK / http://www.eden.com/~feedback -E-mail requests to join the movie review mailing list
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