Me sticking to my word, what wizardry is this?! Yeah any way, jokes aside and without further adue, let's dig in to perhaps the most pretentious movie I have ever seen, Unmade Beds!
Yet something kept me entertained, kept me watching it. I actually ended up not just bearing it but enjoying it. And the reason why has little to do with what the film brought to the table but instead what I brought to the table. The bond between the spectator and a film is a sacred one, as pretentious as it may sound. Everyone comes away from a film differently. This is shaped by our views and opinions which is in turn shaped by the key events in our lives. Even 'it was good fun' is a reading in itself, albeit a basic one. And this film is so light on the details, it allows you to fill all the empty space with your subconscious, with you.
This film captured moments of my life, love and everything in between. The drunken meetings with strangers and waking up in mysterious beds with foggy heads. But more than that. Anyone who has been in 'love' at 14 or older could probably relate to this whole film (although they probably won't want to admit it). The whole hipster feel of the film sadly captures exactly how our mind works when we are in that state of confusion. No matter how much is surreal or strange in this film, it teleport's you to that place all 16 year olds go who believe they are in love. It takes a special kind of offbeat filmmaking to do that and this film nailed that.
But for anyone not really interested in the slice of life genre or has well...not really lived then I can't suggest this film because you won't be able to appreciate the qualities this film has and will merely be held back by the over pretention.
I love indie romance movies because sadly they are just like most of, if not all of my teenage relationships. All the stupid things you say which you think are at the time poetry when in fact you're just comparing a lamp to the sea and it sounds totally dumb. All the photos of things like benches saved as 'the moment when love began' when in fact it's just some graffiti ridden bird shit caked piece of wood in a park, nothing more. All the 'let's be so spontaneous', only really you just run around a park because you have no money to do anything else. And yeah all that kind of crap is here in this movie. Although admittedly all our characters have jobs, honestly we get very little back story on anyone (except great scenes like the prementioned maze scene or a story of one characters accident as a kid that he doesn't actually remember...), so how they do is probably the biggest suspension of belief in the whole thing. So they have money to be a little more 'out there'. Heaven, help us!
So what is the film about? Honestly, it doesn't really matter. It all starts with a kid called Axl who gets drunk a lot and wakes up in strange beds. Eventually he wakes up in a squat and this squat acts a springboard for the rest of our events and our characters.
Axl is searching for his Dad and by the end of the film claims he has found him, despite there being no evidence of this. And then we have a load of side characters to go with him, but they each do little more than have sex and get drunk, so that's all I can write about them.
I'm guessing Vera is meant to be a main character too since she gets a name card like Axl's but Vera has even less plot than Axl. She's seemingly separated from her boyfriend for some reason. One night she meets some other guy, they get drunk, go to a hotel but they don't have sex and she leaves before he wakes up. They manage to bump into each other a second time by chance, this time actually fucking and making the age old mistake of confusing this for love. Oh students, they're the best!
After meeting for a third time of illegally boarding a train and going to the seaside, they end up not finding each other for a fourth time (dramatic music!) with their great plan to withhold all their details and plan their dates by naming a vague place and time and hope they bump into each other. They're the bes-... you know what, never mind.
Yeah it obviously fails miserably the second time with the first time being just luck, what a fucking great twist. What I expected here was for Axl and Vera to then bump into each other, get drunk, fuck and fall in love since they are both the main characters but nope! Their two stories do collide right towards the end but it leads nowhere, like pretty much every scene in this movie.
'Thankfully' Vera finds her nameless lover in the end. THE END. Not kidding. I guess it has some semblance of a beginning and a middle (but it's pushing it to say that) but there is no trace of an ending here at all. It literally just ends. And we learn nothing. I came into this film exactly how I started, just an hour and a half older.
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Oh yeah and some side character happened to bottle out of parachuting but manages to get over his fear or something by the end. Yeah it's a load of pointless nonsense, but these kind of films generally aren't narrative driven anyway, so I'm not sure we're meant to worry. I'm just happy we had at least this much.
Along the way the film is filled with sequences of the characters getting convincingly pissed to bad music and annoying flashing lights before all fucking each other in awkwardly shot, close up sex scenes. There are a lot of scenes where they play the audio from the scene before it over the current scene and the monologue's generally have nothing to do with what we're seeing on screen. But to be fair, most of what we're seeing on screen won't fit with much other than 'we walked/fucked/drank/smoked here'. And there is also some wind sound effects...for some reason. There are some cool moments where they take photos and the film makes the sound and cuts to a photo. But it's as basic an effect as switching diagetic music to non diagetic and vice versa with the removal and placing of headphones on ones head, but like I say, the effects are still cool. There are other things, like a grainy super 8 like effect on the flashbacks and the main characters both being foreign so they think in their native tongues, which is a nice touch. And also scenes which you think are meant to be major plot points...but then never actually lead anywhere. I'd give some examples, but why? I'd end up giving them more credit than they deserve.
Plus as an aside it's also kinda nice that both of our heroes look well...kinda normal. Vera is still gorgeous, but in a gorgeous kind of way that she might end up one day being the kind of girl you 'fall in love' (get drunk and have sex with, swap numbers, go out for a few months before getting bored and making a huge drama out of your break up) with. Rather than a woman like say, Jenifer Connelly who I would never have any hope of bumping into a woman half as beautiful as her, let alone then getting drunk with a fucking or anything else. Although our hero 'Axl' always looks like something between an 80's popstar and a frontman from a mainstream band trying to be indie. And that kinda pissed me off. FUCKING STUDENTS! Least none of them were wearing fucking chinos.
So do I recommend this? Gingerly. But yeah. It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy this film, and not necessarily just some kind of snob. But for everyone else, if they claimed this film awkward, stiff, ugly, pointless, nonsense, grossly pretentious or all or some of the above, I wouldn't argue.
Think About It!
-Locke.
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