Love & Human Remains

David (a gay waiter and former actor) lives with Candy (a book reviewer) with whom he once had a brief affair. David's friends include an obnoxious corporate misogynist called Bernie, a psychic dominatrix called Benita and a young busboy called Kane, whom David is considering seducing.

Candy still carries a torch for David and, feeling frustrated and disillusioned by her subsequent relationships, embarks upon simultaneous affairs with a girl named Jerry she meets at the gym and a mysterious bartender called Robert. Meanwhile, a serial killer is at large in Montreal murdering women and taking their earrings as souvenirs.

Denys Arcand's adaptation of Brad Fraser's play is an attempt to cast a hip, but beady, eye over the dishonesty and complexity of relationships in the early Nineties, conducted in the shadow of AIDS. Although it starts out with an engaging sense of purpose, it lacks the courage of its convictions and finally collapses into thematic and narrative incoherence.

Initially the authors showcase their characters' cynicism with something like admiration - they seem to revel in and even envy David his cool detachment and amoral pragmatism. Although patchy (like the acting), the dialogue is snappy, occasionally witty and heavily reliant upon a sardonic matter-of-factness that I suppose is meant to typify the jaded attitude of so-called Generation X.

However, as the story unfolds, this all starts to feel increasingly like a fashionable pose on the part of the filmmakers. Rather than properly examine emotional cruelty and genuinely cynical people and behaviour in the manner of, say, In The Company Of Men, or Sexual Perversity In Chicago, Fraser and Arcand opt instead to turn their story into a predictable and faintly tedious cautionary tale about love and honesty. Acerbic wit gives way to unedifying conversations about the nature of relationships ("Do you ever feel like you're nothing like anyone else in the world?") and the film reveals itself to be just as shallow and manipulative as the characters it portrays.

The serial killer sub-plot - by far the least interesting aspect of the story - is mostly updated for us via TV news reports, shoe-horned clumsily into other scenes. However, in the final reel it hijacks the narrative completely, turning what was a film (ostensibly at least) about people into a hysterical thriller with paranormal undertones. The decision to dramatise some of the murders hints early on that they are more than simply a macabre backdrop, or metaphor, and it becomes apparent a little later on that one of the main characters is probably responsible. Once this happens, any serious freewheeling examination of the feelings and thoughts of real people in the real world is subordinated to the predictable demands of the murder mystery. In any case, despite some half-hearted and pretty unconvincing attempts at misdirection, the likely culprit is easy to identify long before he is officially revealed, so there isn't even any dramatic tension to compensate for the spiralling implausibility.

What's most disappointing is that a script which spends so much time telling us how messy and complicated modern love is should wrap up all its loose ends with a sentimental coda of such dismaying banality. The upshot is that although I assume that Love And Human Remains is intended as something altogether more off beat and macabre, it ends up resembling the kind of conservative multi-character relationship film of the sort that John Hughes used to churn out with such depressing regularity in the Eighties. Except with more murder and gay sex.