Inner Love

Rating: Null/10 (4 December 2007)

What is a film studio to do? Romance movies make money, so you've got to keep making them. This and the beat-up genre are the foundation of the industry, and the product has to keep flowing.
But at the same time, the audience is not only becoming more and more hardened, they like to see this represented in their film product which is the one place in their lives where most do sophisticated abstract reasoning. What do you do? Well, if you are the world's most mature studio in terms of narrative engineering, you'll try something like this.
Its a romance movie that first tells you what the formula is, shows it to be a cartoon of life. Then it layers "real life"  what I call folding  on it. There's a character that is told by our fantasy girl about movie love and expresses shock that such love is expressed "without irony." The idea is that somehow this fantasy world of movie love penetrates into our real world of rude New Yorkers and bad marriages. The roughness of the real world isn't all that rough though, and our visitor from a pure land does in the end change those around her. There's a child involved but her agency in the business is downplayed; she's less important than the curtains.
So the formula is to first make fun of the formula by putting it in the first movie, the one within, and then let it seep into the outer movie, the one we are presumed to inhabit. At the end, we more consciously buy into the notion of movie romance.
It didn't work so well for me because the "real" world was presented in an inadequately real way. There were construction workers, a rough bus driver, a homeless thief, rude passersby. But none of them had enough edge to count as real. The real world, in fact, was nearly as pretend as the cartoon world. So this breaks Ted's law which states that in order for these nested constructions to work, the distance between us and the outer world has to be the same as that between the outer world and the inner one, here, Andelasia.
In keeping with best character engineering tradition, the girl here is redheaded. There's only one funny bit, a pantomime chipmunk.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.