"Love" is an intriguing little thriller that crosses the roundelay storytelling technique of "Amores Perros" with the noir of the hit man doing one last job genre.
Shot all in New York City (diverse locales in Brooklyn and Queens, even though one scene is oddly identified as being on the Lower East Side), writer/director Vladan Nikolic connects people who have all come to New York to either reinvent or lose themselves. Mostly they are emigrants from strife-torn home countries around the world, but even the sole native is transplanted from Chicago. While they could live peacefully here, they bring violent baggage with them.
Each of the multi-ethnic characters is surrounded by irony, as each time a scene rewinds from another's perspective we find that the characters are not in fact what the other(s) perceive them to be, despite the actions that brought them to intersect.
The actors are quite appealing, as couples come together and fall apart, even as the titular emotion becomes a primary motivator for a range of activities from passion to revenge to self-sacrifice to robbery to murder. The haunted hit man (Sergej Trifunovic) at the center of the story has more depth than usual for such a character, as he becomes a symbol for the detritus of the war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia (and he does seem to find crumbling buildings that look like war ruins). The women are similarly haunted, particularly the world weary Geno Lechner, though one who starts out as a low rent Mata Hari just turns into a shrieking ex. Even the cop is not a stereotype, but as played by Peter Gevisser quite sweet. I did at first get a few characters confused, what with two gray-haired, heavy set guys with guns and two brunettes.
The voice-over narration at first seems out of florid 1940's pulp fiction, but is satisfyingly explained as the story comes full circle.
While the film is all in English, some of the dialog is in heavy accents that were a bit hard to understand to American ears, or it could have been the sound system at the tiny Two Boots Pioneer Theater where I saw it, along with some folks who were evidently listed in the credits as extras. I had tried to see it at the Tribeca Film Festival but hadn't been able to get in.
I appreciated the concept of the score by Standing in Lines to segue from street sounds like sirens to electronica, but it was extremely annoying to the ears, with the exception of effective covers of ethnic tunes.
