REVIEW | Soft Shoe: Alex Holdridge’s “In Search of a Midnight Kiss”

Still, Wilson hangs in there and is rewarded when Vivian reveals a more pensive bent to her nature as the two explore a shuttered movie palace.  Staring at the ornate ceiling fixtures, they stand united in awe.  For the first time, Vivian forgoes the knee-jerk sneer; she removes the sunglasses she’s donned since we met her, and doesn’t once light up a cigarette.  Revived by the theater’s grandeur and humbled by its faded possibility, her human face emerges.

The further unveiling of Vivian’s softer side continues as she and Wilson come across a single shoe strewn on the pavement outside.  She lights up and rushes towards it; turns out she’s been taking pictures of what she terms “lost shoes” for three years (and, naturally, maintains a website called thelostshoeproject.com).  “How could anybody just lose one shoe?” she plaintively asks Wilson, and he appears visibly surprised, moved, as he contemplates her enthusiastic shutterbugging in a shot-reverse shot full of meaning. 

Clearly the moment is meant to make Wilson, and the spectator, realize she has more depth than we initially give her credit for, but the scene, followed by a photo montage of abandoned shoes littering streets and sidewalks, struggles under the weight of its precious lonely-heart artiness.  The snapshots voice the characters’ isolation, both adrift in L.A. after bad break-ups and waiting for their brands of rough beauty to be appreciated by some virtual stranger, but the sought-after sense of romantic unfolding here and elsewhere in the film feels affected rather than truly sublime; “Midnight Kiss” is too standard in its bittersweet conception and palpable in its striving for any real swoon to sneak in.  And, as its title suggests, it has an agenda, which makes for schematic viewing as it attempts to hit its major marks before the clock strikes twelve.

Adding to the anomie are a series of details that gesture more broadly towards the thematic Alienation-Afflicted Modern World wallpaper against which Wilson and Vivian’s story plays out.  “Midnight Kiss,” from its starting-point scenario to asides involving cybersex with a MySpace friend, the photoshopping of masturbation material, and a conversation that pivots on postsecret.com, seeks to illustrate the ways in which relationships are now increasingly mediated by technology.  Holdridge seems to have lofty goals in mind.

Yet without further development (for a more thorough examination, see Joe Swanberg‘s “LOL”) the subtextual meme never amasses enough complexity, and begins to seem like just so much narrative clutter meant to lend heft to a slight story which, like the city it celebrates, conveys an aura of gritty glamour that only goes skin deep.

[Kristi Mitsuda is a Reverse Shot