Meet-Cute

A "meet-cute" is, we are told, a situation in which a future couple meets in a way that is considered adorable, entertaining, or amusing. That definition is taken from the opening titles of the film, but we might as well attribute it to a wikipedian using an IP address that we can trace to Austin, Texas on the 16th of November 2011.Apparently this is a film-school term, a staple of romantic comedies and sufficiently part of the cultural lexicon that it also has both TV Tropes and urban dictionary pages.

This is one of those, with a well-executed bit of technical film-making at the start, and there's enough in that for it to amuse, but it took longer to attribute the text than it did to watch. That 'technical film-making' is a bit of split-screen work, two folk listening to the same track on their telephone-enabled popular-entertainment device, a track by the Zebra Bikes called Will Be. There are a few parallels - a dried out plant and a small watering can filled with gew-gaws and knick-knacks, mirrored toes missing on similar socks, two trailed hands against railings - there's a neat wee twist, and an ending that sort of hints at a subsequent romance. In Q&A at Glasgow's 2013 Short Film Festival writer/director Karoliina Pulkkinen admitted that after editing the film came out shorter than she'd expected, but it's clear what it intends to do and it does it, so by that measure it's exactly long enough.

If your tastes lie in other directions then this won't satisfy, but if you're a fan of romantic comedy, then this is a satisfying little morsel.