'Love and Other Catastrophes' Is A John Hughes-Like Flick With Lesbian Highlights. By Piers Marchant WATCHING THIS FILM, a slight, high-energy, Australian version of Singles, I amused myself by coming up with potential tag-lines (as opposed to the clunky "We love because it is the only true adventure" that the studio decided upon). When the lesbian character Mia (Frances O'Connor) breaks up with her long-time lover, Danni (Radha Mitchell), which is just after the other main female character, Alice (Alice Garner), gets a date with the campus hunk, Ari (Matthew Dyktynski), but not until after poor Michael (Matt Day) has failed in his attempt to meet the both of them, I decided on, "When love blooms, the petals better watch out." But later on, after Mia and Danni have rekindled and Alice has found her true love (I wouldn't dare ruin the surprise), all of which is during the house-warming party the two women have in their new apartment, I thought instead, "Spry romantic comedies give me stomach ulcers." In any event, the film is over-sweet and frantic, like a double espresso with a dozen sugar cubes. You leave the theater twitching from the overdose. You know you're in for it right at the start. The films' credit sequence is set over delightful, giggly super-8 home movies of Mia and Alice clowning around in their new apartment to the strains of advanced supermarket music. Oh, lord, you think: IRONY. But the truth is the film is too sweet to be cynical. After the first scene or two, we've learned that: a) Alice is the Shirley Feeney character, sweet and cute as a button, wanting a boyfriend (which, she is to explain somewhat expositorily, she hasn't had for three years) who is left-handed and likes the same movies she does, and; b) Mia is a gay Laverne DeFazio, breezy and manipulative, who happily enjoys the chaos she projects into her life. What we don't get much of is depth. First-time director Emma-Kate Croghan (who also co-wrote the screenplay), gives us likable, amusing caricatures of college students. The genre is tried and true, of course, from Animal House to Reality Bites. Young folk are particularly easy to typify and short-change, especially for comedies' sake. It can be a winning formula, but in Croghan's hands, unfortunately, what you're left with isn't a whole lot better than an old-school John Hughes flick (okay, sans the lesbian angle). The film, which all takes place in the course of a single day and night, was reportedly shot very quickly within the constraints of a tight budget, which does give it a kind of kinetic bounce: The characters charge from scene to scene with reckless abandon, but it moves so quickly we never get to settle in with any of them. The male characters suffer more noticeably from this treatment. Ari, a good-looking but grandiose philosophical classics student, becomes more and more vacuously self-aggrandizing as the film progresses. Michael, the shleppy med student, remains nervous and mostly unmade. Despite the addition of oh-so-penetrating printed quotes (from Jane Austin, Alfred Hitchcock and Nikki Giovanni, among others), and an incessant philosophical kibitzing ("Love is always dangerous," Ari muses near the beginning) the film never dares go any deeper than surface level, as if that would slow its frenetic pace too much. That these people all find love in the end isn't surprising, it's how small of an emotional blip it manages to register that you notice. Not to be totally tyrannical, the film does have an even pace and flow (albeit at 45 rpm), and the actors, especially O'Connor and Garner, each have their moments. You get the sense it was a blast to make for everyone involved in the production. The enthusiasm shows, but after the culmination of events and the women's party, where all things become reconciled, you realize there wasn't any real conflict to begin with. Croghan spends the entire film trying to convince us of the depth of her characters' romantic problems, only to have them laughingly resolve everything by the end. External angst? It was all a mirage; everyone's happy after all. Have a nice day. Love and Other Catastrophes opens Friday, May 16, at Catalina (881-0616) cinema.

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