Movie Review: In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007)

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/movies/01kiss.html

August 1, 2008
Hopeful Misanthrope Seeks Same

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Lightly sweetened and just a touch bitter, the romantic comedy “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” treads familiar if appealing ground. Written and directed by Alex Holdridge, and made with high hopes and a conspicuously low budget, this feature-length drift across the modern landscape of love and desire suggests that in the age of MySpace (not YourSpace or OurSpace), hooking up has become harder than ever, an idea neatly encapsulated by one of the kickier first-date dialogues in recent movie memory:

“What are you looking for?,” a man asks.

“The love of my life,” a woman answers.

“On Craigslist?”

Apparently it isn’t easy to score if you have hit the loser trifecta: you’ve broken up with your girlfriend, you’re newly transplanted to Los Angeles and you want to be (poor soul) a screenwriter. For Wilson (a very fine Scoot McNairy), a scruffy depressive with spooked eyes whose longing pushes the story forward and a wee bit sideways, no place is lonelier than home, especially if it’s doing double duty as a passion shack. From his corner of the cramped apartment that he shares with his longtime friend Jacob (Brian Matthew McGuire) and Jacob’s sexy, underdressed girlfriend, Min (Katy Luong), Wilson has been afforded an uncomfortably close view of other people’s happiness. It’s a pretty enough picture, though not if you’re feeling as laid low by life as Wilson is.

“In Search of a Midnight Kiss” is largely about how this likable pup gets off the bench, the couch, his bed — out of his head and into the world — which means it’s about growing up. That makes it a heroic voyage, of sorts, and also prosaic, though mainly in a good way. Most of the movie’s low-key charm is in its close-to-the-ground verisimilitude, evident both in the contours of its grungy urban locations and in Wilson’s struggle. He isn’t desperate, just stuck. (Help is always a room or phone call away.) He simply needs to get going, as does the movie itself, and so, after a little narrative dithering and an unfortunate sexual incident involving a computer, he places an ad on Craigslist: “Misanthrope seeks misanthrope.”

What he finds is a surly blonde, Vivian (Sara Simmonds), a little girl posing as a femme fatale. After meeting cute and somewhat cruel at a restaurant (he takes a number while she interviews another prospect), the two travel to downtown where, amid crumbing buildings, faded movie palaces and signs of new, gentrifying life, they walk and they talk, sharing funny and forlorn stories, histories and observations. Although the movie’s black-and-white digital photography is clearly meant to evoke both the melancholy and visual beauty of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” — the allusion just makes you yearn for that earlier film’s rich, velvety, celluloid texture — Wilson and Vivian’s stop-and-go peripatetic flirtation owes a stronger formal debt to Richard Linklater’s twinned walkabout romances, “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.”

These kinds of cinematic allusions are risky because they invite inevitable comparisons. (And to that end: even the lovely wide planes of Ms. Simmonds’s face recall those of Julie Delpy, a star of Mr. Linklater’s “Sunrise” films.) Even so, while “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” has its derivative moments along with awkward patches — the inelegantly shaped climax tries to force uninteresting parallels between the two central couples — it manages the difficult task of creating a sustained, plausible and inviting world. That part of this world has been formed by other movies is to be expected. Mr. Holdridge, after all, is a young filmmaker living and working in Los Angeles who, much like Wilson, is navigating one tough town.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS

Written and directed by Alex Holdridge; director of photography, Robert Murphy; edited by Frank Reynolds and Jacob Vaughn; produced by Seth Caplan and Scoot McNairy ; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Scoot McNairy (Wilson), Sara Simmonds (Vivian), Brian Matthew McGuire (Jacob), Katy Luong (Min), Bret Roberts (Buoy), Twink Caplan (Wilson’s Mom) and Nic Harcourt (Radio D.J.).