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Unmade Beds
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| Year: |
2009
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Director: |
Alexis Dos Santos
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| Stars: |
Déborah François, Fernando Tielve, Michiel Huisman, Iddo Goldberg, Richard Lintern, Katia Winter, Alexis Dos Santos, Lucy Tillet, Al Weaver, Leonardo Brzezicki, Sinead Dosset, Tim Plester
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| Genre: |
Drama, Romance |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Axl (Fernando Tielve) is a twenty-year-old Spaniard in London, who has arrived there with nothing on his mind except to track down his lost father. He knows he was English and his name, so his search has ended up here, but is hampered by Axl's tendency to get drunk and forget a lot of what has happened to him, as this morning when he awakens in yet another bed, in a warehouse that doubles as a squat. There he meets Mike (Iddo Goldberg), who puts him on the right course, but what of Vera (Déborah François), a Belgian bookshop assistant who lives there?
Poor old Vera barely has a mission to call her own, and that would appear to be the point in Unmade Beds, to capture that random, directionless feeling of young adults who cannot seem to get their acts together and shake up their lives to divine a sense of purpose. But what about Axl, you say, doesn't he have a goal in seeking his absent father? Sort of, but even when early on in the story he works out that this man (Richard Lintern) is an estate agent nearby (quelle coincidence) he fails to do much about it and prefers to wander around in a state of near-confusion and indecision. The other main character Vera fares little better.
Except that she had the advantage of being played by Déborah François, an actress who audiences found it easy to respond to whether due to her beauty or her vulnerable quality, both of which were well to the fore here. Only if you took a closer look, Vera wasn't any more satisfying a personality that Axl, it's just that her lovelorn adventures were somewhat more conventional in this type of indie movie and easier to relate to than the more far-fetched tale of the Spaniard, who distractingly resembled a young version of the British actor and comedian Alan Davies. It was obvious that these two were going to cross paths sooner rather than later, but director Alexis Dos Santos made us wait nevertheless.
They do walk past each other a couple of times, but this is not a set up for a romantic meeting of soulmates, mainly because Vera already has her heart set on a man she meets when out, during one of the many binge drinking episodes that feature. We never find out his name, though presumably she does at some point (he was played by Michiel Huisman), which adds an air of mystery, but not so much that Dos Santos felt it had to be resolved at any conclusion to any explicit degree. What started out promisingly shaggy grows to look more vague and difficult to pin down, as seen when Vera and her new man somehow continually neglect to secure any details about each other whenever they meet.
There was an overt attempt to court comparisons with the French New Wave of the sixties in Unmade Beds, yet while superficially it was accurate in that recreation of the style (title card inserts, jump cuts, the odd dash of subversive humour), the revolutionary mood that infused much of that work was entirely missing here. It could be that this said as much about its generation as the French pioneers did about theirs, but it was a fact that many found the film hard to get on with, as it refused to settle down too much to make sure we knew it was not simply rambling on with no point in sight. There was a destination here, and if you were feeling as sensitive as the characters then you would likely respond, but this was more a film for those in the same uncertain position as Axl and Vera. Unmade Beds had its charms, but they might have either been too subtle or too studied and twee for the cynical members of today's society.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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