Transversal to wide audience popular comedies (Love Actually), to serious bankable work (like Babel), to author films (like Almodóvar), there is has been a growing tendency to invest the film world with a certain idea of tiny links that bind people beyond their understanding. The idea that we are all connected with heavier or lighter degrees of intensity to many people we don't know. Other than having any kind of God above us to control us and decide our fate, the divinity in this world is coincidence. Random unpredictable actions drive our lives, like Johanson winning the supermarket prize because the other guy let her go first. The narrative result is that these constructions make us, audiences, be the charters of unknown territories, since we always see whatever new connection comes up (many times things the characters themselves are not aware of) but we are also constantly finding out new things. It's a strategy rich and full of possibilities.
I like the mold, i like this kind of construction, because it allows for infinite dramatic possibilities, and mastered well it may (and has) become a sort of neo-neo-noir, where we move steps further in throwing characters into unthinkable situations. From that perspective, of the narrative construction, this is not a specially interesting example. All the links exist here to justify the presence of so many different characters, without that meaning that they will be confronted, later in the game, with those links we get to know. Instead it works here as a way to weave at us several different stories, which don't have to be necessarily connected or connectible. It's like an exhibition on relationships or, in this case, seduction skills.
The story in itself is about empty lives, looking for emotional fulfillment, here represented by having a boy/girlfriend. The ultimate example is the life of the very girl who narrates us the story, arguably the one who is more lost, and certainly the one who more desperately seeks the "other half". All the affairs are distinguished in how the character faces them, and in they outcome, from the narrator girl who as the popcorn selling affair, to Johanson, who willingly decides to be alone.
It's shallow and not particularly interesting, but i like the coherence between the not so interesting lives we have here.
My opinion: 3/5
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