Anatomy of a Love Seen

Anatomy of a Love Seen is a contrived premise of a movie. Two actresses named Zoe and Mal return to a film they shot months earlier to shoot PG-13 reshoots of a sex scene. Since that time, they have dated and broke up. Obviously, this makes everything terribly awkward. Especially because they more or less initially fell in love during the shooting of the original scene. As it turns out, there is no actual reason to reshoot this scene. The director of the film, Kara set the day up as an attempt to reunite Zoe and Mal. Basically, she wastes a bunch of people’s time and money to interfere in their relationship.

It was foolish of Kara to interfere in Zoe and Mal’s relationship. Despite the fact that this movie’s premise and poster makes it look like a romance, these characters don’t get back together. Zoe and Mal say increasingly unforgivable things to each other throughout the film. By the end, all I could think was that neither of them should be together as they clearly bring out the worst in each other. This is not necessarily bad. It does lead to dramatic scenes between the pair. What bothers me is that the premise for the film and first act does try and lead you into rooting for them only for the film to essentially tell you not to.

While Zoe and Mal’s love story doesn’t pan out, the last act introduces a new romance and tries to claim it was the major love story the whole time. The focus shifts from Zoe and Mal’s insurmountable problems to the relationship between Kara and script editor, Anne. At the end of the film, they’re the couple that gets the romantic speech and happy ending. This is obviously nice for them but was executed poorly. There’s little focus on these characters let alone this relationship. We see Kara stick up for Anne a few times that but there’s no initial suggestion of great romance. The last act tries to suggest that they were the great love story the whole time. But there was so little focus on these characters that it feels like it comes out of nowhere. If they are the love story this movie wants us to care about, why was the vast majority of the movie focused on Zoe and Mal?

I do like the last scene in Anatomy of a Love Seen. Sort of. The last scene is a flashback to the original sex scene Zoe and Mal film. If you can get over the meta-weirdness of watching two actresses play actresses who pretend to have sex, this scene is pretty hot. I was seriously impressed by it. Admittedly, it’s totally out of place, comes way too late in the film and once again muddies the issue of which couple the movie wants us to focus on and root for. But just looking at it as a sex scene, it is one of the better ones in WLW films I’ve seen. So there’s that I guess.

I’m not mad at Anatomy of a Love Seen, I’m just underwhelmed by it. Anatomy of a Love Seen had some good moments, solid acting and a meta but weirdly good final sex scene. However, none of that was enough to make my opinion of this film more than a resounding “meh.” I just didn’t care enough about the characters and found the premise to be too contrived. There was a chance to make this movie into a very dramatic, dialogue-heavy acting tour de force. That was clearly what they were trying to do, they just didn’t quite get there.

Overall rating: 5.3/10

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