I don’t know what I was expecting from this movie but I was pleasantly satisfied by the laid back style. It’s a journey through two lives that don’t come in contact until the end of the film. A lack of a real climax kept any urgency out of the story but it felt like a normal progression through the abnormal lives of the two strangers with no job, no permanent residence, not going to school and not really meeting until the end, even though they live in the same building. So what exactly do these two have to offer each other? Director Alexis Dos Santos plays with fate so that her characters don’t really figure out their own lives until they have a fateful conversation with each other.

 

The film follows these two drifting youths in London. There’s Axl, (Fernando Tielve), a twenty year old who came from Spain to London to look for his estranged father. He’s always waking up in a different bed, being so drunk the night before that he can’t even remember the girl next to him. He also counts the beds he sleeps in. Then there’s Vera (Deborah Francois), a French girl who thinks she can’t do anything right since she broke up with her boyfriend. She takes pictures of the beds that have to do with her relationships. Everything is so atmospheric as they separately hang out in London, Axl hitting up the bars with his friends and listening to underground indie bands and Vera falling for a guy without learning his name or telling him hers.  Dos Santos tells a relaxed story like you spent the movie while lying in bed.

Nothing is permanent for either of them, but it doesn’t matter. Or does it? Vera loses track of her mystery guy and gives up any hope of seeing him again. Axl befriends the real estate man he’s sure is his father but pretends to be a student looking for a flat. He discovers that the man has his own life with a family and children with a long lost son the last thing on his mind. Then Vera and Axl meet at the after party for a random music video shoot in which everyone is wearing stuffed animal masks. They’re both less than sober and confess their problems. While talking out their disappointments, for some reason, it clicks for them. Axl now sees that it’s pointless to try to be in his father’s life and they don’t really need each other. Vera understands that if she and the guy were meant to be, they wouldn’t have lost each other.

And now Axl can go on living his own life and Vera runs into the guy when his band is playing at the club she goes to. The only reason Axl remembers Vera the next morning is because of a Polaroid they took, but he can’t see her face because her mask got in the way. He muses that he may have met the love of his life last night, but he won’t be able to find her again. It’s as if they complete each other without actually being together. Soul mates for a night.

It was fun to watch the accidental blending of separate lives and treating it like there’s no such thing as accidents. People can affect each other in unexpected ways. Dos Santos did a wonderful job of arranging her film to be the story it needed to be. Unmade Beds made a lasting impression on me, which is what I look for in a good movie.

Tags: Emma Lord, sundance, unmade beds

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:42 pm and is filed under News, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.