Pretenders

So Terry gets engaged to famous star Victoria (Juno Temple), stealing her away from cinematic auteur Maxwell (Franco) – but even then, his heart aches for Catherine. Despite Victoria’s help in getting his script produced, Terry bounces at the first opportunity and absconds to Los Angeles with his life’s love, leaving Phil behind. Until that is, things take a turn (read: plummet) for the dismal towards the end of the film. The highly-improbable finale, involving the surfacing of Catherine’s past (and Brian Cox’s two-minute cameo), attempts to make a statement about cinema’s (and life’s) artifice but will leave you scratching your head.

“He gets the period details right, and there are a few truly affecting touches.”

The dull plot isn’t helped by Josh Boone’s forced, awkward dialogue, with characters frequently waxing pseudo-poetic about love and movies. Its romanticized tone feels dated rather than nostalgic.  Peter Zeitlinger is a skilled cinematographer, but the decision to have each frame’s edges out-of-focus is distracting, serving no purpose but to reiterate Pretenders’ pomposity/self-indulgence. There are also at least a dozen scenes of couples, pardon my French, f*****g. While I have absolutely nothing against sex scenes (au contraire, mon cheri), here they’re boring, repetitive and inconsequential. That said, Franco’s made enough films to gain some genuine craft. He gets the period details right, and there are a few truly affecting touches. The cast is fine, yet the leads curiously lack chemistry. The jarring leaps in narrative don’t help matters.

Quantity over quality seems to be Franco’s motto. He’s quite consistent in how inconsistent he is. A gem like The Disaster Artist is bound to surface now and then; it’s the law of averages. While Pretenders isn’t nearly as good as that award magnet, it’s also not as awful as, say, Franco’s Mad Max rip-off Future World (seriously, wtf happened there?). Perhaps in another 30-40 films, we’ll see him on the red carpet again.