Bellflower

Director: Evan Glodell
Starring: Evan Glodell, Jessie Wiseman, Tyler Dawson
Time Out rating:

Love is a battlefield in Bellflower, a breakup movie that uses its apocalyptic affectations to distract us from the shallowness of its relationship insights. After they meet cute at a cricket-eating contest, Woodrow (writer-director Evan Glodell) and Milly (Jessie Wiseman) take a first-date road trip from LA all the way to Texas. She’s a wild child with a rocky romantic history. He’s a sweater-vest-wearing softie with a dark side, epitomised by afternoons spent indulging in childhood Mad Max fantasies with a hard-drinking buddy (Tyler Dawson). It wouldn’t take a doomsday prophet to see the fiery end this courtship is headed for or to predict Woodrow’s transformation from sensitive nice guy to bitter and bearded road warrior. What did Chekhov write about a flamethrower introduced in the first act?

'All things end' reads a mid-film title card, and that’s about as deep as Glodell, a first-time director, would care to go in understanding how his characters get from the idyllic pangs of first love to the seething resentment of the aftermath. Bellflower takes it much easier on the boys than the girls, the latter of whom drive the former into spells of psychotic rage with their infidelity and nymphomania. Best to just get lost in the film’s scorched-earth imagery or to give in to the games of chronological trickery that set in once a main character suffers a timeline-disrupting head injury. Certainly, it would take some form of brain damage to buy the milieu – a boho wasteland where none of the twentysomething party animals seem to have jobs or obligations – as any version of reality.

Bellflower opens at Theater N Shibuya on June 16