A Terrible Movie

In the movie the woman leaves the man because he will not let her sit on his face anymore and she cannot fathom why that would be, sex was the last good thing they had, fused like a common diamond between them but stored in a lighthouse at the end of the driveway. Caretaking her genitals had been his one job, she told him toward but not during their end and it was his flush of symbolism in the physical positioning and his access to the breath that convinced her he was lying; there must be another woman.

This wasn’t true, however, and as scenes drag on where she is camped outside his new apartment or following him from the pier where he keeps his 14-foot Whaler, the same 14-foot Whaler that stranded them on an island and almost gave them a child, she begins not to disassemble as the audience is led to expect, as neither her nor the ex are likable for any other reason than their passions, which a friend remarks in a flurry of unnecessary dialogue is why anyone is likable at all, good or evil, look at Mao.

She instead goes about trying to fix him up with a character we meet after the first two thirds of the plot, a friend she makes intentionally from another floor at work and through an implausible concatenation of lies convinces this new friend she’s never met her ex but heard of him through a dating forum where women bucket known men into sexual taxonomies. This site does not exist, in the movie or in life, and the new friend exhibits no interest in logging on, just gets the details second-hand and becomes such a piece of putty in our heroine’s hands that you champ for the reveal up her sleeve but it never comes other than when she admits, as though horses shamed her, that she comes from money and this detail we are to repaint back over her flimsy decisions.

Eventually she goes out with the ex and sits on his face; but here the director, for all the war crimes, shoots the scene as though it were a monster where she never shows anything, not even the small of the woman’s back or his feet flush on the carpet, even though the film’s opening was alarming in pornographic detail and half the audience squirms hoping they weren’t the only one counting on the new friend bemounting the ex and getting to—on the walk/drive home—compare the two rides. 

What we do see, however is our female lead cleaning out her ex’s fridge. At first this appears an act of senseless insanity, she wears a yellow headband that’s played no part until now, until we see that she is reloading his fridge with vegetables and meats. It gets to the point she can’t close the door and she explodes into tears and slides down the door like a splatted cartoon and then leaps up and bars the handles with a set of grill tongues. And we’re left here, zooming endlessly into the unwashed metal like that powers-of-ten gif as his not her giggles, not moans, drift from the bedroom.