USA
3.5*
Director:
Roger Avary
Screenwriter:
Roger Avary
Director of Photography:
Robert Brinkmann
Running time: 110 minutes
Rules of Attraction is mostly about sex. It’s set on the campus of some liberal arts college in New England, where student life consists of parties, intercourse and drugs; in the film’s opening scene, one of the lead characters wakes up while she is being raped by a stranger who proceeds to vomit all over her. We never see any of the students in class, and we see very little class in the students. But the film’s editing is mildly stylised, and one particular shot is unlike any other we have seen before. More below.
Roger Avary co-wrote Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, and Rules of Attraction is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name. Ellis, of course, created the world of American Psycho, which is an extension of the world of The Rules of Attraction. Avary’s film has retained Pulp Fiction‘s playfulness in subverting the time continuum and Ellis’s dark humour mixed with sex and violence. While the film is a succession of parties, the one more debaucherous than the last, we only realise, once we get to the last party, that it is actually the first party and that we have come full circle. This structure, and the presentation of the material (the events often play out in reverse as well), may well be visually associated with the numerous hallucinogens that the students consume over the course of the film.
The four main characters are Paul, Sean, Lauren and Victor. Paul wants Sean, Sean wants Lauren, Lauren wants Victor, and Victor, well, he will take whomever he sees first.
It’s college, students are horny, and people get hurt – physically, emotionally, or both. Ian Somerhalder is perfectly cast as the slightly androgynous Paul Denton, but while Avary might have wanted Dawson’s Creek’s James Van Der Beek to break out of his shell with the role of ultraviolent Patrick Bateman’s drug-dealing brother, Van Der Beek’s character, Sean, is physically presented as a vampire, which turns his performance into something of a farce.
The split-screen is sometimes used to show us two different realities (one really taking place and the other a fantasy), but the film’s most romantic moment is conveyed by means of a breathtaking use of this technical gimmick, when it unites two characters in(to) a single frame. The film has many other clever little tricks up its sleeve, including a gun pointed straight at the camera during a very tense exchange between Sean and his drug dealer.
The Rules of Attraction also contains a horrifying suicide scene, which is more than a little sensational, since the character ending her own life is not a very important character. The film does try to justify itself by pointing out how peripheral she was in the life of the boy she admired, and subsequently also in ours, but the gruesome nature of the act provokes repulsion at the visual instead of the emotional that one would have expected to be concomitant.
The characters’ dialogue sounds right, especially when Sean and Paul leave a party together to go and smoke weed, and the other party guests try to determine whether they have really “left the party together”.
The film is as haunting as Mary Haron’s American Psycho, with the ubiquitous hunger for sex replacing the other film’s desire for violence. Technical gimmicks like the scenes played in reverse do become a little bothersome, but Avary’s approach to his characters is not superficial, and I would love to see what Avary pulls off the next time he is behind the camera, which is way too infrequently.