Review of The Rules of Attraction on Filmviews.net
Year2002 ReviewerChris Docker
Marketed as American Pie meets Pulp Fiction, Rules of Attraction may be ultimately and unsettlingly less comic-strip than either of the films it purports to be a blend of - or alternatively you may just find it empty, lacking in laughs, and meaningless.
Rules of Attraction can, however, be seen as more than the simple gross-out comedy it starts off as. Misrepresenting itself as inane, it lulls the viewer into a false sense of superficiality, an apparent nonchalance. But the veils are lifted from the slapstick campus hedonism, firstly by revealing a deeper characterisation than the opening burlesque would suggest, and secondly by contrasting the apparently buoyant atmosphere with a stark nihilism forcefully rendered by unfolding events.
Rules of Attraction follows the student drink, drugs, sex and unrequited love themes of many formulaic movies. It might almost be written off as little more than a fart-and-w**k movie were it not for the early stylish cinematography and crisp dialogue, which maybe hint that it is more a send up of them than a clone. Engaging roll-backs take us from a straightforward bad taste pastiche - drunken students have sex while another films the action, the first male repeatedly and almost absent-mindedly vomiting over the woman he is shafting. We follow the camera in reverse (including the vomit going back into his mouth) and the two dimensional characters gradually take on more depth. Initially we laughed and felt revolted by the antics of such cardboard cut-outs but then the genre shifts gear imperceptibly and we have to take them more seriously. The grossness may have temporarily blinded us, for instance, to the fact that the vomit-spattered student was actually being raped, but the vaguely persisting air of unreality robs us of any moral outrage. It is the emotional bleakness of the film that hits hardest. Things are not what they seem, even to the characters of the story. Any belief in 'love' is cruelly and repeatedly banished by the harsh reality each of the students faces. The cynicism runs almost like a homoerotic commentary on the pointlessness of heterosexual attraction - except that gays are equally subject here to blind conviction in matters of love and lust. Even suicide is degraded - not the grand statement of the unrequited lover, but a minor incident in an irrelevant series of obsessive misunderstandings.
What are the 'Rules'? On one level, the film might be saying, "there are no rules"; on another, more pessimistic level, it has rules like "if you truly are attracted to / love someone, they will feel more attracted to someone else"; "if you happen to love someone who also loves you, then one or both of you will screw things up". This is not a film where people screw things up and then get over it, get forgiven, and live happily ever after. Instead, it says when you screw up, you become less of a person - you, or the object of your affection, are suddenly exposed as far less than ideal. You cease to be worthy of any sort of love. The glorified image becomes not only human, but normal, ordinary and pathetic. As the recently unenamoured Lauren says towards the end of the film, "It doesn't matter, there's lots of people like him" and then in a moment of self-reflection adds pointedly , "lots of people like us". Love has been acknowledged as mere mirage, both for the object of love and for our own self image.
At the screening I went to, hardly anyone left before the end of the credits. Perhaps this was an interest in the cast, the unusual way the credits rolled backwards, or even a sense of release from constant shock; or maybe it was a natural pause to try to believe again in dreams the film had worked so hard and so convincingly to dispel.
Rating: 7/10;