Love in the Time of Money

Petter Mattei's "Love in the Time of Money" is a visually stunning film to watch. Mr. Mattei offers us a vivid portrait about human relations. This is a movie that seems to be telling us what money, power and success do to people in the different situations we encounter.

This being a variation on the Arthur Schnitzler's play about the same theme, the director transfers the action to the present time New York where all these different characters meet and connect. Each one is connected in one way, or another to the next person, but no one seems to know the previous point of contact. Stylishly, the film has a sophisticated luxurious look. We are taken to see how these people live and the world they live in their own habitat.

The only thing one gets out of all these souls in the picture is the different stages of loneliness each one inhabits. A big city is not exactly the best place in which human relations find sincere fulfillment, as one discerns is the case with most of the people we encounter.

The acting is good under Mr. Mattei's direction. Steve Buscemi, Rosario Dawson, Carol Kane, Michael Imperioli, Adrian Grenier, and the rest of the talented cast, make these characters come alive.

We wish Mr. Mattei good luck and await anxiously for his next work.

Love In The Time Of Money is very representative of its era of independent films. First, it is an ensemble piece, including frequent "Indy" stars Steve Buscemi and Rosario Dawson. Second, it has an interesting artistic mechanism to advance the plot: daisy-chaining from one character to the next. Third, it's a lot of slice-of-life moments with similar themes but no particular overriding plot. Fourth, there is a lot of intense inner-city camera work, and diverse camera angles to juxtapose, art, scenery, and faces. Five, the performances of the members of the ensemble run the gamut of tired (Malcolm Gets) to sublime (Carol Kane) and mostly solid with an emphasis on quirkiness in between.

So, with all the other bases covered, I read other IMDb reviews to make sure that it has the most important characteristic to be representative of today's independent films. Its supporters wax enthusiastically about how different its perspectives are from "your typical Hollywood films." At the end of the day, the film is blessedly short by such standards (87 minutes), and certainly watchable, so if you are looking to pass time, you could do worse -- but you could do better. For me, this defines mediocre. One notable exception: if you love Carol Kane who appears in the second half of the film with characters Nick and Will, take the time to see her magnificent performance -- easily the best in the film.

I kind of enjoyed it until I nodded out on it. The structure is that of a skin flick. Characters are linked as in La Ronde or The Leopard Man. We meet Jill Hennesy, who is a class act, no doubt about it, and isn't getting along with her husband, and so makes it with a plumber or something. (Don't worry. The sex isn't explicit and there is no nudity.) It's marvelous, though, to see Jill Hennesy, the modelesque and feminist lawyer on "Law and Order" asking some surprisingly sensitive goon who is trying to help her hang up a painting to do her a favor -- "Make love to me." Okay.

She finds her husband, some kind of art dealer, not interested in her sexually. (!) She kisses him and tells him, "I'm horny," and he walks silently away and turns on his favorite jazz piano record, while she turns on every noisy appliance in their high-end apartment.

So why (you ask) is the husband indifferent to her charms? What's the matter with him. Is he gay? Well -- yes. Or rather bisexual, I suppose, since he married her in the first place. But hubby's real interest is in Steve Buscemi, an artist, and he comes on to Buscemi in a rather assertive manner and tries to kiss him. I don't know why. Buscemi is a great actor and a delight to see on the screen but, my God, he's got the canines of a vampire. Buscemi gently tells him, "I'm not gay." But then there is a love scene between them. I can't tell how explicit this was because I was covering my eyes and having an attack of homosexual anxiety.

Fortunately the next episode, involving Buscemi and Rosario Dawson, was enough to reassure me about my gender identity. Is there a greater constitutional puzzle than Rosario Dawson? Most people, at a glance, would classify her as African-American and yet she's a salad of racial genes, no more biologically "black" than "white" or "Hispanic". Something similar holds for people of mixed race like Halle Berrie and Mariah Carey. If you took all the genes of all the humans in the world and put them into a blender they would come out looking like these actresses (only more ordinary). They only belong to one or another racial classification because they -- and we -- say they do. This is known as "the social construction of reality." Now I'd like you all the read Berger and Luckman because there will be a quiz.

Next episode: Dawson has some sort of confrontation with her handsome white boyfriend. "We have to talk about this," she says. (I'm not making that up.) It was about this point in the movie that eurythmic breathing set in.

Anyway, you get the picture. One sexual episode leads to another, just as in a skin flick, except that here there is no nudity and any coitus we witness is simulated. In other words, in this movie, the emphasis is on the interludes between sexual encounters. And what are they like? They're like Woody Allen, that's what they're like. Ordinary little people doing ordinary little things that have to do with relationships. When Jill Hennesy and the picture-hanger are looking through a kitchen drawer for a hammer, they find there is no hammer. But Hennesy takes out one irrelevant item after another and dangles it before him? A box of staples. "No good?"

And at the bottom of the drawer, one of those flat plastic containers from a Chinese restaurant that everyone seems to save. "Soy sauce," says the plumber.

If it hand't been on TV at such a late hour I would probably have watched it through, although the ordinary little people, on screen or in real life, can be a little dull at time. Will Rosario Dawson reject Buscemi's appeal to let him paint her? I really didn't care except for the vague hope that we'd discover whether Rosario Dawson's figure was as mouthwatering as the rest of her.

An unambitious movie, but nice New York locations, and the acting is quite good really. It's Hennesy's best role at any rate.

A good indie flick that I stumbled on late night the other day. I love indie flicks set in NYC like most Woody Allen flicks and films like Rodger Dodger, Tadpole, an indie flick with Adrien Brody which I can't recall the name but is an overlooked gem, etc. The ensemble cast is very good and the director connects the stories very well. I liked the stories with contractor and the hooker, Steve Buscemi was good as usual, and the scene with Michael Imperioli at the end with the hooker was very well acted. Also, the banter between Buscemi and the gorgeous Rosario Dawson was well written. I just wish they showed her naked as she looks like she got a nice body. Also, look for a pre Entourage Adrien Brenier who has a decent role. I thought he was very good in the overlooked indie "The Adventures of Sebastian Cole" also.

This movie is best watched late at night (if you can stay awake). It is 90 minutes long where the first 85 minutes are an odd and eerie sequence of scenes that seem to transfer from one character to the next in what appear to be chronological order. Then in the last 5 minutes the movie's point unfolds, and you're left with an interesting puzzle that may make you want to see it again: was the movie forward chronological, reverse chronological, disconnected, or an endless paradox that is broken in the "end", which is were the movie began? Makes me wonder if the title is a riddle, too. The first 5 minutes is also important, if you're trying to close the loop.