What is love? It’s a question that has vexed thinkers from Plato to Haddaway. Israeli director Alma Har’el, whose roots lie in music videos and art installations, makes no claim on knowing the answer, but is persistent in repeating the question. If the chatter at this year’s Tribeca film festival is to be believed LoveTrue, Har’el’s latest, was financed without the consultation of lawyers after the increasingly art-adjacent Shia LaBeouf became a fan of the director since her last picture, the hallucinatory portrait of a California ghost town, Bombay Beach.
LoveTrue is a portrait of three individuals who share no connection other than being unhappy. Blake is a big-hearted young stripper in Alaska, who finds tremendous empowerment and gratification in her job, but worries that she’ll be trapped in it forever. She finds herself unable to maintain lengthy relationships, and the man she loves, who suffers from a rare bone disease that makes physical intimacy difficult, is drifting away. Will is a young surfer and coconut salesman in Hawaii raising a young son whose biological parents, he learns, are actually his difficult ex-girlfriend and former friend. Despite no legal or even ethical responsibility to raise the child, the bond is already there. Finally there is Victoria, a member of a family of New York City buskers who live with their father after their mother leaves due to his chronic adultery. Though relations are strained, the family sing Christmas carols with a determination to raise enough money to keep her out of homeless shelters.
Har’el rotates between the three locations, and is considerably less interested in telling you “what happens next” in her subjects’ tales of woe than in getting you in their headspace. This means a lot of evocatively shot imagery set to Flying Lotus’s dreamy music. Victoria rides the Roosevelt Island tram, Will floats around underwater and Blake jiggles for singles and gazes out windows. Har’el also mixes in a few interesting gimmicks, like voiceover narration trailing off to be replaced by subtitles, plus flashes of dramatic recreations from key scenes from the past. Additionally there are visitations from “the future”, like when we first meet a stripper in her mid-50s she’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Older Blake”. Initially she’s just a vision, in time we hear from her and she (presumedly a “real person”) becomes an individual.
Har’el has abundant technique with the camera and in the editing room, but the garnish isn’t quite enough to compensate for the fact that, even with three stories, not one of them is all that interesting. Victoria is the only one of the three you’ll want to spend any time with. She and her siblings are quite remarkable singers, and their gospel iteration of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love performed on a subway platform is exceptional. All the pensive, magic hour photography of Will surely looks nice, but doesn’t really get you inside his head, and Blake’s dilemma of whether to stay at her job at age 25 with no children, while surely of grave consequence to her, isn’t exactly earth-shattering. This isn’t to say that an emotional conundrum like this couldn’t make for dramatic cinema, but this film has none of the weight of, say, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Goodbye First Love. I’m looking forward to Har’el bringing her considerable formal talents to a subject more deserving of the technique.
