DRINK enough cups of coffee in Los Angeles - two should do the trick - and you will eventually find yourself sitting beside some self- absorbed poltroon who feels the need to bore the world with his achievements and discontents. Stay another week and he will have turned his story into a no-budget independent movie.
In Search of a Midnight Kiss, a success at festivals throughout the globe, feels like just that class of beast. Heavily influenced by John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and Woody Allen, Alex Holdridge's picture concerns itself with Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a budding screenwriter who has, to this point, failed to make the best of his time in LA.
When Wilson's flatmate (Brian Matthew McGuire) catches him doing something intimate before an improvised pornographic image, he urges the depressed scribbler to use his computer in a more productive fashion. So Wilson arranges a blind date on the internet.
At first Vivian (Sara Simmonds) seems like a solipsistic nutcase, but, as the two wander about LA's faded downtown, they begin to make connections. It is New Year's Eve and midnight is looming. Will they end up kissing?
There are certainly points in the film where you find yourself wishing violent calamity on the couple. Wilson's whiny tone is rarely enlivened by any genuine wit, and the inconsistency of Vivian's personality - deranged, then caring, then pathetic - makes emotional connection impossible.
But In Search of a Midnight Kissultimately proves to be a winning exercise in low-key, low-budget whimsy. Robert Murphy's glassy monochrome photography finds interesting things to do with such underused LA locations as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the city's yawningly vacant subway stations. McNairy does eventually manage to squeeze personality out of his sparsely written part, and the film has a neat circular structure that feels unusually orderly for such a ramshackle enterprise.
There is evidence here to suggest that indie film-maker Holdridge has the talent to make an independent film about something other than an independent film-maker. Midnight Kisswill do nicely until that picture arrives.
DONALD CLARKE
