Culture

Directed by Florian Habicht, (4.5/5).

There’s a point in Florian Habicht’s Love Story where he faces the camera and confesses ‘I fall in love so often.’ Not quite explaining, not quite apologising. ‘It happens all the time,’ he sighs. The fatalism is no surprise. He has handed responsibility for his film’s story over to a cavalcade of punks, drunks, grade-schoolers, pensioners, teens, psychics and drag queens. His hapless, ever-shifting love is palpable, as he records their answers to the question ‘What should happen next?’
Habicht and his Russian muse Masha Yakavenko are making a film – or are they falling in love? The set pieces that emerge from his tender interrogation of New Yorkers’ love lives are deranged and wonderful: impotence, a car crash, hermaphroditism, all intrude as the story is invented – dictated by the kind of strangers only New York can provide, saying the first thing that comes into their heads. Habicht and Yakavenko’s rendering of this saga is exquisite, somehow conjuring a living, breathing relationship from these vox pop directions.
It comes from all sides. Broiling in the NY heat, Habicht sits in his bath, ringing random numbers for advice. A Texan advises him to pursue his infatuation, while a few minutes later, the tarot reader tells him to keep his defences up. A stockbroker orders him to ‘play it shy’. What actually happens? The guerrilla documentary style of Kaikohe Demolition and Rubbings From a Live Man meets the maximalist fiction of Woodenhead and spawns a not-quite-documentary that feels bizarrely fresh.
I realised I had been holding my breath for a young New Zealander to make a film this clever. Shot entirely in NY – by a German-born Kiwi – it was the standout entry from New Zealand in the 2011 International Film Festival, and a gloriously successful experiment. Having managed to license a score by the likes of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, the soundtrack is sumptuous and potent, imparting a touch of emotional velvet to the film’s more erratic seams.
Love Story wears its logic lightly, always returning to its spontaneous premise as it winds itself into a charmingly neurotic confusion that seems to speak for the plight of lovers everywhere. A peon to the people on New York’s streets, an absurdist rom-com, a flawless comic subversion; I’m not sure what Love Story is. Possibly genius.