June 10, 1998

Showings:
June 14 - Enzian, 7pm
June 16 - Colonial Promenade, 7:15pm

There are four of them: Brenda, Michael, Aimee, and Mikey. Brenda is a 39-year old ex-stripper who wants to marry so a man will help her with the bills; in return, she will grant this man sex with her four times a month. Michael, a 40-year-old bachelor, wants to be married but finds it hard to get involved with women because he is short (he believes that women only get involved with tall men) and because when he tells women he is 40 and unmarried, he is often mistaken for a homosexual. Aimee, overweight and insecure, feels that her life is over because she is 28 and not married. Mikey, a gruff screenwriter whose work won't sell, was a player in the early 1970's, but now, as he nears his golden years, does not understand why he can't get laid as much as he used to.

These are the people in Nicholas Barker's excellent pseudo-documentary Unmade Beds, a film about four New Yorkers looking for love, and for the American Dream, through the personal ads.

I say 'pseudo-documentary' because the movie has the appearance of a documentary, but in actuality, as my research at the Internet Movie Database stated, it is scripted, like drama, and has amateur actors in the four leads (all of which do excellent jobs for screen debuts). The twist is that these actors are playing themselves and that the stories they tell are things that actually happened to them. Director Barker wrote their stories down and then filmed them in a documentary style. Quite an imaginative twist, don't you think?

Also ingenious is Barker's choice to cast his film with four people whose romantic travails people can relate to easily. I don't want to give away too much (much of the joy of this movie comes in the slow revealing of these people's personalities), but at one point or another, I'm sure everyone watching this film will empathize with something Brenda, Michael, Aimee, or Mikey has done or felt in their search for love and security.

We follow these characters for a little under a year. They go on dates. They preach their philosophies on people. They try to change themselves into something the opposite sex will find more desirable. They gripe about being lonely and the fact that no one wants to meet them. Barker shows them act absurdly (Brenda decides to marry a man needing American citizenship for $10,000), sadly (Mikey laments that he's blown his chances for happiness in life years ago, and he doubts another chance will ever arise), tragically (Aimee breaks down in Central Park while crying, "It's just so hard wanting something that you can't have."), and frighteningly (Michael's dejection and loneliness leads me to believe that he is fast on the path to becoming the next Joel Rifkin).

Little by little, director Barker strips away layers of personality from his characters, revealing them all to be equally romantic and equally desperate. (More than once, I had the feeling that they chose to be in this film to further their chances for a mate.)

But through it all, Barker still believes that there is hope, not only for these poor lovelorn souls, but for everyone - implied through the numerous shots of open apartment windows that he intercuts between the narratives. Shown in these windows are the various people of New York City sleeping, making love, arguing, watching television - small reminders that life still goes on no matter what happens and that perhaps patience is indeed a virtue.

Eyal Goldshmid I am a fiction writer supporting myself as a government clerk for the US army. Until I can fully live off writing, I plan to milk all the luxury I can from the American taxpayer. Other Articles I've Written