Love Is Real

A separated couple try to come to terms with their loneliness in their own ways, leaning into the deviance of their sexual habits to try and supplant the aching void they feel inside.

Aoife (Sole) is broken. When we first meet her, she is busy trying to free her mind as a whale in the ocean, meditating on the support of the water and the freedom of movement in all directions. Gradually though, the whale song breaks out into squeals and screams, and the imagery of sexual gratification keeps pushing through into her conscious mind to remind her of what she actually wants. Cut to a party, where a few people are milling about outside somebody’s house, and Aoife, complete with four-inch platform f***-me boots, approaches a man from nowhere and asks him to come home with her.

At Aoife’s place she sets about getting what she wants, but insists on playing games with her new toy and physically tormenting him, pushing him away and slapping him whenever the intimacy gets too real. Obviously used to a more violent level of sexual activity, Aoife loses her companion and is left alone. Mark (Simon), on the other hand, is much quieter in his quest for gratification. After giving a hand-job to a stranger he met on the bus, he goes home and deals with the problems that exist there, with his quiet, brooding father, absent brother, and sequestered mother who is hidden away behind closed doors. The two lonely-hearts search the streets of the city for anything that might resemble real love, but find that either they, or everybody else, is lacking in that department.

Whether or not Aoife and Mark’s Love Is Real, is something that is left up to the viewer to decide. What we certainly see, is that in every instance apart, they search for real love in the wrong places and reap the consequences for that. Their sexual deviations push them in dangerous directions, and leave them at the mercy of those who would take advantage or want something more, with those who look at sex as an act of power only too ready and willing to exert that power to get what they want.

The direction from writer/director, Albert Bullock keeps everything gritty and real as we follow the two lead characters around the streets of the city. The lens almost feels like it has a layer of grime over it as we descend further and further into deviance and danger in order to satisfy a desire that is either misplaced or formed from a place of trauma. The underpass scene, in particular, is strikingly real and hard-hitting, with the camera and sound choices really emphasising the danger women face every day from sexual predators, not to mention the difficulty for those who may feel a need to step in and save the day. Bullock’s shot choices are flawless and he fills a frame expertly well, with some really nice artistic visuals in the composition of his scenes, leaving the film with the feel of a kitchen-sink drama, but with the look of a cinematic feature.

The acting, too, is of a high quality from both leads, underplaying on the surface the deviance they share, and allowing a lot of their characterisation to come from their look and their actions. Sole especially, as Aoife, is able to turn from little-girl-lost into sexual deviant at the drop of a hat, with the gradual decline of her mental health being mirrored in the state of dishevelledness that she shows in her person. The strong understatedness of Simon, as Mark, also really adds to this feeling of something unnamed bubbling just underneath the surface.

However, in the end there’s no real story attached to the two lovers, just a thematic link which coalesces them together into a short narrative. The imagery and scenarios are mostly independent of each other and could have taken place at vastly different times without altering the feel or message of the film. Love Is Real feels more like a series of vignettes, each stating the startling reality of a different aspect of sexual deviance, which each character encounters apart from the other, before coming together in the end. In this way, Love Is Real feels like it could be just one thread from Plan B’s Ill Manors (2012), but without the rest of the story to fill in the context and the meaning, leaving it slightly lacking in the message it is trying to deliver and ultimately in the impact it leaves behind in the audience.