‘Sex Love Venice’ Puts the V-A-I-N in Vanity Project
The queer indie drama "Sex Love Venice" squanders an onscreen trip to Italy on an uninspired gay romance.
Putting the v-a-i-n in vanity project, writer-director Steve Balderson’s Sex Love Venice might set records for solipsism in a queer indie protagonist, a category with an epic list of contenders.
But the film’s hero Michael (David Bateman), lovelorn in L.A., takes the cake among gay movie leads whose entire world is presented as a series of interactions centered solely around him and his search for romance.
To friends Liza (Suzanna Akins) and Dave (Zaramok Bachok), Michael expresses his frustration with his life of casual hookups, revealed in flash-cuts to frank nude scenes, usually depicting a lack of enjoyment in one party or the other.
Balderson, who based the film on his own life experiences, underlines clearly enough visually that the instant gratification m.o. isn’t working for Michael.
Then, of course, Michael wants and needs to discuss how lost he feels, and apparently not much else. He talks to a therapist (Fahad Alhumaid), and to his professor guru (Marek Probosz), and intrudes on Madame Zara (Pleasant Gehman), insisting she give him a reading on her day off. Gehman’s delivery of Zara’s brusque brushoff provides the movie’s most believable moment.
Michael tries to talk to some of his dates about his feelings, but guys just want to get naked. If none of them feel like listening to him, at least he has Liza and Dave, who are so thinly designed as mere sounding boards for Michael’s many laments, that they have nothing else going on story-wise.
Trailing him to Venice, Italy, on a trip sponsored by his rich mom Lynn (Mink Stole, slumming, actually), Liza and Dave listen and support and advise and don’t do anything related to themselves — in Venice! Balderson and editor Jimmy Cohen don’t offer a scrap of present-day plot to the characters as people with lives off of Michael’s page.
Akins is appealing as up-for-adventure Liza, so she’s especially misused. Even when Michael does show reciprocal interest in his best girlfriend, or ask her something about herself, it’s only as a prompt for whatever it is he really wants to say about himself. The film’s a sad slog through a one-sided friendship if you find Liza at all interesting.
That’s not a concern with Dave, whose one trait is that he worries too much. He’s usually the butt of the movie’s bad jokes, like one about the bidet. This trip to Venice is full-grown adult Dave’s introduction to the existence of bidets. So Liza and Michael call him “Bidet-ve.” That’s as good as it gets.
Occasionally, the cinematography by Hanuman Brown-Eagle — who also shot Balderson’s 2022 sci-fi feature Alchemy of the Spirit — elevates the proceedings, particularly photography of the city at twilight. But, frankly, if you go to Venice and can’t get gorgeous shots of palaces and sunsets, you should toss your equipment into the lagoon.
The film also features sequences that can’t be saved by the beauty and wonder of Venice, like the slow-motion, heavily filtered montage of Michael, Liza, and Dave striding mouths agape through Venezia’s streets and plazas. Gulls swirl and chirp, while Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Adagietto swells grandly on the soundtrack.
That’s before the movie arrives at its pompous coup de grace, Marco (Alexander Ananasso), a preciously Italian local Casanova that Michael meets off an online app. As Marco shows Michael and his friends around his town, he plays a long game of the slow tease, keeping thirsty Michael at bay with some of the most insufferably written “Let’s-take-it-slow” claptrap ever performed in a movie.
He takes a ridiculously long time to acknowledge that Michael won’t be there forever. And if an actual person, upon whom Marco might be based, really tried to woo a visitor with these eyeroll-inducing lines, then hopefully they were tossed into the lagoon before they ruined someone’s trip.
Sex Love Venice (★☆☆☆☆) is available to stream or purchase on digital through Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play, YouTube Movies, and other cable platforms.
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