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'Modern love is automatic' dating
A fake documentary written and directed by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland examines the love that two men feel for the same woman
By Ned Martel
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Apr 29, 2005, Page 17
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Matchmaking in the modern age is exposed in Mail Order Wife.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FILMMAKERS
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This strange, often silly mockumentary compares the love that two very different men feel for the same simple, submissive helpmate.
The first suitor meets Lichi through Paradise Girls, a matchmaking service for US men and Asian women. A young filmmaker named Andrew is on hand for her arrival and her indoctrination in the household preferences of Adrian Martin, her new husband.
He is a doorman who owns an El Dorado, likes his home in Queens well scrubbed and wants his chili spiked with long squirts of ketchup. She must also learn to feed his pet snake, Chipwich, a diet of live rats.
Lichi's subjugation rankles the filmmaker, who soon discovers that she submits to more than fastidious cleaning regimes. She is shown shaving Adrian as he sunbathes in his paved backyard and indulging in his dungeon fantasies, and then the relationship and the film begin to break apart.
Lichi takes refuge in the filmmaker's home, inspires him to ditch his fiancee, and a new romance arises with its own set of injustices. A collection of clever details -- her first foam Statue of Liberty crown, her penchant for toy pigs -- get lost in a contorted plot.
The narrative manages 30 solid minutes of ingenuity before breaking into a version of Charlie Kaufman-style absurdity. The writer-directors, Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko, build some solid emotion from realistic performances, especially those of Eugenia Yuan and Adrian Martinez, who play the initial Queens newlyweds.
Then the scrappy project crumbles into gags and some screaming jags, wasting some intelligent comparisons about race, gender and class. In the plot's wreckage, there's the trenchant and timely focus on men who no longer want women partners to be their equals and prefer the mute smiling type, until they don't anymore.
| Film Notes: |
Mail Order Wife
Written and directed by: Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland
Starring:Andrew Gurland (Andrew), Adrian Martinez (Adrian) , Eugenia Yuan (Lichi) and Huck Botko (Huck)
Running time: 92 minutes
Taiwan Release: today |
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The directing duo, who cast themselves as the on-screen filmmaker and his sidekick, keep doggedly after their madcap mission of revenge for much too long, certainly outlasting the attention of many viewers. But maybe the film affected me too deeply, since my feelings for Mail Order Wife are akin to each man's romance with Lichi. It felt so good at first, but it was all wrong.
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