(IMAGE: CDH Film Co.)
Epec Media, 2022. Comedy/Noir. 111 minutes.
Grade: 1 out of 4
It’s not a huge surprise that Bad Romance writer-director Chad Hamilton’s official bio lists his USC student film first; Bad Romance feels like a student film idea, full of self-consciously clever references and twists but crucially lacking in empathy. Some of that may be due to casting a stand-up comic in the lead – while said comic, Sanjay Rao, has no problem making himself look like an incompetent fool, he and Hamilton don’t give us much reason to care. Rao’s character of Rob frequently comes off as “accidentally” creepy when he’s trying to do something earnest, without seeming to realize that Rob is, in fact, a creep. He doesn’t mean to be, perhaps, but we’re talking about a guy who hits on every woman he meets, and nearly kills one of them by sticking a syringe in her neck to draw blood (you don’t wanna know why).
Shot in black and white to give it a noir feeling, yet filmed on the hipster-populated streets of Austin for ironic contrast, Bad Romance is most directly inspired by Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Rob knows, or thinks he does, that a man named “Jack S.” killed his wife. (That’s a riff on Memento‘s “John G.,” but said aloud it also sounds like “jackass.”) He thinks he has a lead given to him by his friend Frank (Jeff Riberdy), who knows of a bartender named Hannah (Emily Trent) with a “Jack S.” tattoo. Turns out Jack’s her ex, and she wants to find him as well, leading Rob to concoct an insanely convoluted trap in which they’ll pretend Hannah has been murdered, presumably luring Jack S. out to clear his own name and find the people who’ve framed him, at which point they’ll capture him.
It’s a ridiculous plan, and Rob is an idiot – at one point he uses Google to try to figure out how to run a license plate, then wonders aloud, “What’s a DMV?” Later, he pretends running license plates at the DMV has always been his favorite pastime that he’s really good at. His narration is frequently belied by his onscreen actions; nevertheless, he persists. Why Hannah humors him remains unclear, even when her true motives do come up later. Was his reckless endangerment really worth it?
In a neat self-referential twist, Rob looks for an assist from the world’s greatest screenwriter, who turns out to be a know-it-all video store clerk played by Hamilton himself. He too is more annoyingly ignorant than likably naive, but at least he feels like a real human being. The most sympathetic character in the whole thing turns out to be “Jack S.” himself, played by independent filmmaker Raleigh Moore with a gentleness and sincerity that everyone else onscreen lacks.
At around the 70-minute mark, some story twists and reversals kick in, but again, they’d be more effective if we cared. Part of the subtext is that Rob is desperately lonely and just wants to make friends, so instead of questioning people he tries to either hang out with them or ask them out, but he’s one of those desperately lonely people who tries way too hard to the point of obnoxiousness. Plus, again, he’s a moron. His entire plan brings to mind Tom Sawyer’s overly elaborate scheme to free Jim in Huckleberry Finn; rather than doing things the easy way, he has to make everything more complicated and worse because of movies he’s seen or heard about. Mark Twain’s humor worked because of the contrast between Tom’s fiction-driven mind, Huck’s skepticism, and Jim’s utter aghastness. There’s nobody like that here, as Hannah just goes along with everything, and Jack S., like the Dude, abides.
Hamilton clearly finds all this stuff amusing, and humor is relative. But true comedy, in the classical sense, is about seeing mutual mortal foibles. Rob is like an apolitical Qanon supporter – he’s really driven by some ludicrous ideas, doesn’t (and won’t) know what he doesn’t know, and can’t be reached or even toned down by smarter folks; when new information actually does reach him, he claims he always knew it. In a world currently being ruined by similar mentalities, it’s hard to feel for that.
Should you get caught in this Bad Romance? Let’s just say blah, blah, nuh-uh-uh.