Online dating services have been around for a long time now, at least a couple of decades. Initially, they were quite involved and required one to write bios and statements of various kinds. Slowly but surely, the process was simplified until we arrived at Tinder, an app where all that matters is how you look in the split second it takes the human brain to process an image. Whether the transition from more word based services to more picture based services represents a shift towards favoring the so-called ‘male gaze’, I can’t say for sure. But this is at least one possible interpretation, given the stereotype that men are more ‘visual’ than women. The other interesting constant about dating apps is that a clear pattern of lying appeared: women lied about their looks while men lied about their availability. Nhung Nguyen is a graduate student at UCLA. She’s also the writer and director of Love, Laugh, Dooms, Tears, a short film about her own experiences with Tinder and with some of the phenomena I mentioned above. Nhung is from Vietnam, and, we can infer from the film, a first time user of dating apps. The first man she meets, she says with an excited voice, is originally from Paris. What could be more romantic? True to the stereotypes, the Parisian had a girlfriend back home in France and had no idea that his relationship with Nhung would go so far. And that was the end of that. The visuals Nhung choses to tell this part of the story are great. She begins by putting on her red shoes, as David Bowie might say, and dancing the blues. Then she’s carefully applying makeup, and then, as she reveals the relationship’s denouement, she begins the smear the makeup all over her face and to eat it. In the background, we hear the sound of flies buzzing. It is a truly horrifying moment and we can see exactly how she feels.
This is Nhung’s real strength; it is not so much the plot that makes this film stand out, but it is Nhung’s brilliant visual sense that draw us in. The plot is, to most Americans below the age of 40, not surprising, as unfortunate as that is. She goes on to tell the tales of several other men (all white) that she has relationships with. Things go from bad to worse, to absolutely horrible. There’s a 4 hour bus ride across Los Angeles at one in the morning, calls to campus police and other awful vignettes. But all through the film, Nhung presents us with strikingly original and memorable images to demonstrate her emotional state. When she tells us about one of the ridiculous and probably racist things her dates say, she punctuates the title by showing a knife slashing at a piece of pork. Or smooshing bananas. Or stabbing heart shaped balloons with sharp rocks. Or running her fingers over Gregory Peck’s face, while he’s projected onto the wall in the 1945 Hitchcock film, Spellbound.
Nhung has a wonderful and subtle sense of humor and she mixes this humor with the tragic elements of her story brilliantly. In the first scene, she awoken not by her alarm clock, but by a vibrating dildo. She slides right off the end of her bed in an effort to silence the device. Also, throughout the film, she’s accompanied by a male mannequin we come to know as Joe. He starts out okay. But as the film progresses, he gets into more and more trouble. Is Nhung taking out her frustration of the poor guy?
At the end, there is a pop song from the 1980s about a Vietnamese girl who’s never sung traditional songs or known the good old Vietnam. Over the song are images of US helicopters blowing up fields and wounded Vietnamese people being carried away on stretchers. There’s at least a slight suggestion that Nhung’s experience on Tinder is somehow a parallel with the Vietnamese war. This seems to be quite a stretch, but the scene is open to interpretation. In fact, Nhung’s ability to tell a not so original tale with superimposing images that could be read various ways is another of her strengths.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.