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MOVIES

The Rules of Attraction
MBM Rating:
HOT ALERT: James Van Der Beek, Kip Pardue, Ian Somerhalder

The Rules of Attration is kind of a teen movie for grown ups, directed by Roger Avary, the guy who wrote one of the stories for Pulp Fiction. It's adapted from the novel by Brett Easton Ellis - yes, that American Psycho chap - and in fact the two films have even more of a connection that just the author.

The Rules of Attraction tells the story of Sean Bateman, played by James Van der Beek. Sean goes to the fictional Camden College sometime in the 80s, where he seems to spend all his time smoking, taking drugs, going to wild parties and chasing after the girl of his dreams, Lauren (played by Shannyn Sossamon).

However, Lauren's not interested in Sean; she's a virgin, and only wants to have sex with the love of her life, Victor, who has just come back from travelling around Europe. There is somebody who likes Sean: Lauren's bisexual ex-boyfriend, Paul played convincingly by Ian Somerhalder. Throw into the mix Lauren's room mate Laura (Jessica Biel), and you have yourself a right complex love quadrangle.

The film begins at the "End of the World Party", where we meet all the characters in various states of (un)happiness, and as you might expect from one of the writers of Pulp Fiction, this is also where the film ends. In between we have various sexual shenanigans, a few close encounters with Sean's provider of narcotics, a burning man, a series of mysterious love letters, and a fair bit of teenage angst and misery.

These are mean, sex-mad students, who do little more than run around after people they will never get, stopping at every opportunity to have a smoke or sniff cocaine.

However, on the brighter side, the film is a visual delight, full of bright colours and quirky cinematic devices. The famous "split screens folding into each other" scene is memorable, as is the gimmicky but useful opening party scene. In this, time moves forward for the first character, telling the story of her night. When it gets to the end of that, the screen pauses, and the character's name appears on the screen. The film then begins to literally rewind itself (including dialogue spoken backwards), back to where we were at the start. The camera proceeds to pick up another character, and follows them to their respective conclusion, before doing the same again. Fortunately this is only done three times; enough to appreciate the effect without getting bored of it, and it makes for an exciting opening.

All in all, Rules of Attraction is an example of style over substance if ever I saw one. It's worth watching simply for the original narrative structure and astonishing visual tricks, and there are entertaining moments, but if you're expecting American Pie-style humour or American Psycho's brutal satire, you've come to the wrong movie - it's somewhere in between, but at the same time neither. It doesn't really know what it is; part comedy, part romance, part college slacker type movie, part obsessive stalker film.

Buy this movie here.

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