Singles
Written and Directed by Cameron Crowe
Starring Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgewick and Matt Dillon
Music by Paul Westerburg
Reviewed by Karen Fredericks
Once, in a street in inner-city Melbourne, my eye was caught by a framed black and white photograph in a shop window. Something about the way the photographer had caught a young man and woman kissing passionately on a city street — they in focus and passers-by a bustling blur of movement — was extremely attractive.
"Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville" (the kiss at the Hotel de Ville), photographed by Robert Doisneau in 1950, is everywhere these days. The romance of the Paris street scene and the passionately nonchalant embrace of the chic young couple have attracted many a customer to the print, the postcard, calendar, T-shirt, key ring and coffee mug.
The craze for Doisneau's picture is evidently not restricted to Australian 20-somethings. In Cameron Crowe's latest film, Singles, Campbell Scott plays Steve Dunne, a traffic engineer in search of a girlfriend who, like so many of his generation of inner-city post-adolescents, loves the photograph. Early in the story, in one of the film's clever audience asides, he delivers a sad monologue outlining his romantic failures. In the end he points to a postcard bearing the Doisneau image and asks mournfully , "Why can't it be like that?" So begins yet another version of a very old story — the search for perfect romantic love.
Cameron Crowe is a clever young film maker. He has taken a perennially seductive subject and fashioned a story, or rather a pastiche of stories, guaranteed to be both recognisable and appealing to young lovers. He has set it to a very "now" soundtrack (provided by the best exponents of the "Seattle sound" including Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Alice in Chains), and thrown in the question of our time: can we afford to remain such individualists in the face of looming ecological disaster?
Crowe, a 20-something himself, portrays a milieu with which he is obviously quite well acquainted. The ubiquitous inner-city cafe with its wall mosaic of theatre fliers and handwritten want ads, the cavernous music venues, the apartment interiors and open-plan workplaces are keenly observed, if a little romanticised. The characters, too, are more beautiful than real life, but they are recognisable.
Matt Dillon, as Cliff the musician, is hilarious. His cleverly stupid dialogue is delivered perfectly deadpan. Script writer and actor have combined to produce a wonderful, gentle satire of an extremely widespread not-quite-post-adolescent "type".
But Campbell Scott was a poor choice to play Steve, the romantic lead. His hair is too short (he came to the Singles set directly from Dying Young, for which he had to shave his head) and he just doesn't ring true as the hep ex-college DJ with a passion for hairy Seattle bands and public transport.
Bridget Fonda is perfect (perhaps a little too perfect) as a doe-eyed ingenue, Janet, a woman who learns that there is more to her own character than meets the eye, and Kyra Sedgewick, with the least interesting role, does a good "girl next door" as Linda Powell.
The central story is that of Steve and Linda, both in ecologically sound employment and both looking for luuurve. By the end of the film they have found it, at least for the time being. The black and white publicity still shows Linda and Steve, la Hotel de Ville, standing in a street scene exploring the insides of each other's mouths. Behind them Cliff's guitar comes between him and Janet, seated together on a park bench with a symbolically placed copy of Ayn Rand's treatise on individualism, The Fountainhead.
Cameron Crowe was apparently spewing when he first saw Melrose Place, the saccharine TV series for 20-somethings made by formula TV king Aaron Spelling. Although Crowe's offering is infinitely hipper, the parallels between Singles and Melrose Place must have been extremely disturbing to a cool young director.
Singles doesn't have a lot to say, but it says it with style. The soundtrack is fantastic, and the script has some truly funny moments. The central characters didn't really interest me, but I found the subsidiary stories amusing and the subtext, on the need for community, apt for these times. If you're young, or you dig a young scene, you'll see plenty you recognise.