My Last Five Girlfriends
Brendan Patricks in My Last Five Girlfriends
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By Adam Leveridge
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Monday, 15, Mar 2010 05:29
Directed by Justin Kemp, starring Brendon Patricks, Naomie Harris, Cécile Cassel, Kelly Adams, Jane March, Edith Bukovics, in cinemas March 19th, running time 86 mins.
What's it all about?
Duncan (Patricks) is a broken man, worn down by a series of failed relationships and ready to end it all. But before going screaming into that good night, he looks back through the pros and cons of his previous five love affairs.
Who's in it?
Lamda graduate Brendan Patricks lands his first feature lead as Duncan, with support from Naomie Harris (28 Days Later, Miami Vice), Jane March (The Lovers, The Color of Night), Kelly Adams (Bronson, Hustle), Cécile Cassel (The First Day of the Rest of Your Life) and Edith Bukovics (Secret Paths). There's also a neat cameo from Michael Sheen in a spoof interrogation scene.
As an example...
"Why did she have to walk everywhere? Why did she always complain in restaurants? Why did she never have more than six hours' sleep? Why did she find Patch Adams so bloody funny?" - Duncan
What the others say
"Kemp makes a virtue of his choppy cuts and fantasy segments, although the film does take a little while to settle into a rhythm and one or two of the earlier girlfriends feel less fleshed out than others." - Amber Wilkinson, Eye For Film
"In the recounting of five successive failed relationships by young London architect Duncan (Patricks), bracketed by his suicide attempt, [directororial] techniques become devoid of meaning. Some might consider this potpourri of formal practices postmodern, but one person's postmodernism is another's vacuous mélange." - Howard Feinstein, ScreenDaily
So is it any good?
There are several moments in Justin Kemp's My Last Five Girlfriends - based on Alain de Botton's bestseller Essays in Love - that make you gasp "Oh, that's clever", whether it's Johnny Ball playing himself in a children's show explanation of fate, a potted history of a girlfriend's life using Barbie dolls and handmade models or a playful climax that replaces the audience's initial shock with a smirk. But for every smart edit or rewound sequence, there's an overindulgent use of archive footage or the disastrously dull imagined theme park based on Duncan's love life that's introduced too late on to feel at home and isn't funny enough to be welcome for its frequent returns.
Given that writer/director Kemp first had the idea of adapting De Botton's book in 2001, it's bizarre that the film's tone veers so wildly - some of the darkly comic and fantastical sequences work well but it's hard to be entirely gripped when our lead is sometimes such a sympathetic and romantic character but frequently a self-absorbed and bumbling fool. Patricks is promising, mining some of Hugh Grant's manchild masculinity from About A Boy, but his nuanced performance can't stop the viewer from feeling the urge to scream at Duncan to stop being an idiot and get on with his life. He's the sort of hopeless optimist that only exists on screen - anyone this self-obsessed would steadily drive away each and every friend - and that prevents the viewer from entirely investing in his quest for love.
Its visual tics recall the invention of Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer - though that romcom used its quirks with perfect restraint - while the auditing of a love life reminds of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. With a little more of the focus of the former and a character as likeable, even in his misery, as the latter's lead, My Last Five Girlfriends could have been a deserving low budget hit. Instead it's an intermittently enjoyable but indulgent and uneven afterthought.
6/10
Lewis Bazley