Nomadic
young Spaniard Axl (Fernando Tielve) arrives in London, broke and
without accommodation, to find his father, who abandoned him as a
toddler. Upon meeting Hannah (Katia Winter) and Mike (Iddo Goldberg),
he shacks up with them in their run-down but sprawling East End squat
and acquires a taste for underground music, promiscuity and
binge-drinking. Amongst this he meets even more new people, but
naturally he's forgotten them the next morning. Vera (Deborah
Francois) is a young French artist, also an emigrant to London, who
was crushed when her ex abruptly ended their romance. Nonetheless she
tried to reacquire that love with the help of Polaroid cameras and a
new tryst with the mysterious “X-Ray man”( a pre-Game
of Thrones Michiel
Huisman). But as a protective shield, she's committed to full
anonymity for this and listens only to her own superstitions – a
plan which backfires when she finds herself falling back in love.
Romantic
comedies are very hit-and-miss for me, but writer-director Alexis Dos
Santos' Unmade Beds
(2009) is such a
delightfully refreshing, vibrant and honest addition to the genre
that it rocks my socks. It navigates with gentle clarity and
understanding the phenomenon of trying to find yourself, socially and
personally, in a strange new environment rife with risky temptations
even if you're past adolescence (these are young adults, not
teenagers) and it doesn't flinch from covering quite so much of what
contributes to two people forging a lasting connection. Dos Santos
infuses all of this with a striking and unpretentious
bohemian/hipster visual aesthetic, and his screenplay offers two very
personable and fresh lead characters, and Tielve and Francois are
nicely cast. It's also not afraid to affectionately mock them
occasionally, especially in an hilarious scene in which a massively
drunk Axl reenacts a dangerous stunt he pulled as a child.
Finally,
it also becomes quite a wise metaphor for how we all leave a legacy
in the places and people we experience in our lives, even though
those people can enter and exit ours in turn. We can leave a mark
even with just our lifestyle, if we're messy or whatever – hence
the title. It comes down to memory. As far as rom-coms go, Unmade
Beds is grungy, blunt
and daring – but in a strangely cute, hip way.
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