Unmade Beds

Nicholas Barker's cinematic journal about four desperate singles prowling the personal ads in New York City is at once witty and deviously contrived. Most audacious of the lot is Brenda, a voluptuous Italian bombshell who's hunting for a sugar daddy to pay her single-mom bills in exchange for a discreet, and infrequent, number of sexual couplings each month. Michael is a diminutive 40-year-old suffering from nice guys' disease; Aimee, a sweetly Rubenesque 28-year-old, is also dating challenged and deathly afraid of turning 30 without a husband. And Mikey, a pot-bellied 54-year-old screenwriter (though he's never sold a script) who looks like a jowly Dennis Hopper and speaks in Mike Hammer monotones, describes his apartment as a "fuck palace" and insists, time after time, that he has, and never will date a "mutt."

Unmade Beds appears to be a documentary, but in fact it's a scripted feature that extrapolates from its characters' real-life personalities. Barker does capture the incandescent mystery of New York's nocturnal cityscape, and the jazzy, New Age soundtrack accentuates the film's dark mood, but for a staged act, the film revels too much in the banality of its subjects squandering drop-in-the-bucket opportunities for rife humor and sardonic wit. At the Avon Friday, November 20 through Tuesday, November 24.

-- Peter Keough