LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1997 Scott Renshaw
(Fox Searchlight) Starring: Frances O'Connor, Alice Garner, Matthew Dytkynski, Matt Day, Radha Mitchell. Screenplay: Helen Bandis, Yael Bergman, Emma-Kate Croghan. Producer: Stavros Andonis Efthymiou. Director: Emma-Kate Croghan. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 76 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
For what it's worth, I suppose I learned something from LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES: romantic comedies can be just as predictable and uninspired in Australia as in the U.S. If attractive, likeable actors and a non-threatening lightness of tone count for anything -- and heaven knows that they can -- LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES may find an audience receptive to its nominal charms. I suspect audiences are more likely to discover that it has absolutely nothing new to say, and that its moderately eccentric/neurotic characters are very familiar. LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES is a ride on flat, straight ground to nowhere in particular.
The plot follows a day in the life of five Australian university students coping with various minor dilemmas. Mia (Frances O'Connor), a flighty lesbian, is forced to navigate a bureaucratic obstacle course to change programs, on the same day she is struggling with commitment issues with her girlfriend Danni (Radha Mitchell). Mia's roommate Alice (Alice Garner) is trying to complete her film studies thesis on Doris Day as feminist icon, while pining from afar for a notorious womanizer named Ari (Matthew Dytkynski). Meanwhile, medical student Michael (Matt Day) responds to Mia and Alice's ad for a third roommate, unaware that Alice is the coffee shop clerk to whom he is attracted.
There is a certain energy to LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES which makes it hard to dislike actively. Director/co-writer Emma-Kate Croghan keeps things moving at a brisk clip, and provides at least a couple of amusing sequences; the best involves Mia racing from place to place trying to find someone to approve her change of program before the deadline at the end of the day, dealing with dilemmas like the inconvenient death of her advisor. The cast is uniformly appealing, and unlike may romantic larks about young people, the characters never start to grate on your nerves with their insecurities and crises. All things considered, these five seem pretty well-adjusted.
So much for the damning with faint praise. The fact is that LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES is a 76-minute movie which takes forever to end. As nice as the characters are, most of them never progress beyond a single dimension. Alice is the most complex character, a perfectionist whose impossibly high standards for a significant other take a back seat to some animal lust for Ari, but Croghan and her co-writers never explore that dynamic; it's just a blip on Alice's emotional radar which quickly vanishes. The characters march with such ease toward their respective happy endings that there is not a moment of tension, and it's all so shallow that you may forget every relationship half an hour after watching. Even the very 90s twist of making one of the couples lesbian can't generate much spark. A couple without chemistry is a couple without chemistry, gay or straight.
Among the more perplexing aspects of LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES are Croghan's few attempts at idiosyncrasy, all of which fall flat. A farcical scene of film students dressed like their idols (Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, etc.) seems wildly out of place, and the burnt orange cinematography makes you wonder whether Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer hijacked the production somewhere along the line. I suppose Croghan had to do something to spice up the material, but it might have been a better idea to write a complete script, develop the characters and their relationships, _then_ put together a good-looking cast of characters. Frances O'Connor's bright smile and Matt Day's geeky handsomeness can buy few minutes of good will, but sooner or later people have to do something vaguely interesting. LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES isn't a catastrophe; it's just the kind of aimlessly frothy romantic comedies America has churned out a hundred times before. Only the accents have been changed to distinguish the guilty.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Down Under-achievements: 4.
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