Like Love

Or: Two Toothbrushes

Meet Harper (producer and screenwriter Lilly Yasuda), your anti-romantic comedy heroine; sharp, smart, taking no guff, and casting grimaces all about her, like she’s waiting for the world to spring on her either some painful emotional trauma or a really, really bad pun. She’s not wrong to worry. Boyfriend, best friend, you know the drill and who gets screwed. Cast out of her home she meets and takes up rooms with Jackson (Jospeh Bricker) a laidback romantic and local play’a looking for company in his big, lonely house. She moves in and the spark of steel and flint ignites … a warm and comforting friendship. They get each other. But when Jackson begins to incubate decidedly non-plutonic feelings towards Harper, feelings she decidedly does not reciprocate, how can they keep the fire of their relationship alive without either or both of them getting burned?

Harper starts the story off in a romantic war zone, literally caught in an absurdly surreal Meet Cute between a doe-eyed bumbler (Chris Canfield) and a quivering dilettante (Tess Makenna) and then fights her way for a stiff drink dodging around couples and avoiding the pick-up games of the Nice (Chaz Gentry) and the Nasty (Austin Von Johnson). But while we’re definitely far from the wonderland of the romantic comedy we aren’t in a dull, stabbing satire either. A particular twist in the old formula is that Harper less hurt by the betrayal of her boyfriend Jude (David Kociol) then the lost of her cheating friend Bryn (Kelly Barker), a tender and philosophical soul, who protests (not without point) that Harper really has no want or use for Jude, nor any of her partners past.

The film shows us a close, nimble cleverness, exhibiting sly cuts and wry compositions (including a witty scripted montage at a playground, and hilarious exhibition of Harper and Jackson’s wing-person skills. Plus also, A Satanic Duck (Stephanie Kerbis)!) My beloved hometown of Boise, Idaho also does much to illicit a feeling of the confining beauty of a midsize metropolitan area; blue skies, plenty of sun, favored diners, and forgiving clerks; large enough for housing is a heartache but small enough that you are guaranteed, at some point, to run into someone you’d rather not run into.

 The sound quality (perhaps of the first cut, perhaps of the premier space) halved much of the dialog from the harvest of my ears, and some of the dialog I caught was merely peppermint: sweet enough, but with a tendency to fracture into awkward shards. Still there are plenty fine zingers for Yasuda to flavor with her acerbic, deadpan wit and much of the film lives on her expressions of incredulity that melt from humoring cynicism to a painful (but no less droll) earnestness (as she laments to her father at one point, “I just want to be wrong about something for once.” a line that sunk true with ripples that lapped over the entire story prior). Bricker gives Jackson a beatific obliviousness, out of which trots sheepish desire a mulish stubbornness. Like the best co-stars they bring out the best in each other.

The idea that its only one solitary individual who should understands your soul, co-author your life, and makes your bed a paradise, is a fairly recent one, and has proved not all that practicable. The idea of “the friendzone” and the lovers escape from it by a grand romantic gesture and into the open arms of the beloved, is even more problematic. But Yasuda’s Like Love while giving those two old chestnuts a solid cracking also teases apart the idea of concept which, while blitheringly obvious in its essentials (no means no, maybe means no, yes means yes, but watch yourself, pretty boy), can lead to dreadful entanglements because people are people and hearts are mutable (as well as Demi, Cupio, and Asexual personalities being, in the common parlance, A Thing). Many is the relationship, a light of one’s life that’s been doused to darkness by one party professing feelings for the other, or, as Harper puts it, “Men don’t want friends they can’t F***.” (My own long-standing but sadly ignored philosophy: “Keep your mouth shut and your heart chilled; love is madness, romance is idiocy, sex is evil and will destroy everything.” I acknowledge there are dissenting opinions.)

Like Love may be harsh and unafraid of heaviness but it is a comedy. Still it’s not afraid to shine a light at ways where it could turn into a horror film very quickly. When Jackson makes his big move the music becomes a dark coiling tendril, while Harper’s face frosts in a carefully schooled expression. Even more driving comes in one of the stories brief intermissions, where an unseen interviewer talks to various couples who have loved and lost. The penultimate interviewee (Abigale Simms) appears alone, talking about how hard it is to say no to interested guys, how her she is expected to sacrifice her sovereignty for the virtue of “being nice,” and how deeply ingrained that destructive instinct is. “After all,” she finishes with a smile shattered grimly across her face, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

But Jackson is not an out and out villain or even a complete fool. He’s just been sold a bad line and believes in it, wholeheartedly and entirely senselessly. But as sweet as he is, as charming as he is, this isn’t a movie about a man in the strange twilight of the friendzone. And it’s not about a victim of internalized patriarchy either. Harper is not a “likeable” female lead. She is prickly as h*ll, but she is no less worthy of our esteem and affection because of it. Many of her decisions are questionable but we can see precisely the path that led her to take them. Moreover, there’s no “thawing” no grand revelation for her, she just learns to retract a few of her spines so she can embrace those hands dear to her without harming them or being harmed.

Funny and heartfelt, Like Love’s magic lives in tiny tings: for me one of the most moving emblems of Harper’s and Jackson’s bond comes from a lingering shot of their two toothbrushes, leaning together in a cup by a chance toss. A tiny illustration of life without the confusions and crucifixions of romantic entanglement. Where simple connection, being with someone who gets you, can be more than enough. For my own part is sent me back long ago in my own life, when I ruined one of the best friendships I’ve ever had by professing my heart. I wish, with only the slightest sliver of bitterness, that I’d seen this film before, so that I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut, or at least have known what to do after.