By Josh Lewis

Spanish writer-director Cesc Gay returns to Toronto for the seventh(!) time with this unconventional anthology of awkward, overlit romantic comedy encounters that are meant to reveal the complicated histories and immature choices that we try to cover up and ultimately form the foundations of how we navigate our daily lives. Despite his attempts to unite these episodes around basic ideas of infidelity, half-truths, sudden impulsive opportunities, and disappointing realities, Gay struggles (as most do with anthology films) to find a way to coherently blend a satisfying whole out of his handful of short stories about young couples drifting apart, older men getting back into the dating pool, and actresses putting on performances in their romantic lives as frequently as their professional ones. There are some nice comic detail to the performances, like a scene where an old writer realizes his young model girlfriend is going to break up with him and weaponizes café table manners to preserve his dignity and break up with her first, or another involving the logistics of a girl hiding her dog park friend in various apartment bedrooms and bathrooms to avoid the appearance of cheating. However, for every clever or farcically conceived minute happenstance there are more haphazard and careless ones—such as the excessively cynical section about competing, gossiping middle-aged soap-opera stars, or the one that derails itself with a lazy shock trans twist. The conclusion meant to be reached is obvious, that sometimes messy romantic scenarios are made worse by knowledge, and that lying, or at the very least letting things go unspoken, would make us feel better. This has the potential to be a cathartic idea and perhaps would be in a film that builds momentum to reaching it, but Gay seems content with juvenile starts and stops.

Josh Lewis