Doubting Thomas
Thomas in Love gives us little reason to love him back.
The
beginning of Thomas in Love, the new feature from Belgian
director Pierre-Paul Renders, is reminiscent of Wayne Wang's underappreciated Center
of the World. The movie screen becomes a computer screen and we, the
viewers, are put in the perspective of eternally unseen protagonist Thomas Thomas (Benoit Verhaert) as he
logs on to a porn site. As in Wang's film, our hero is addicted to the Net and
his computer screen, unable to deal with the world at large. Unlike in Wang's
film, the run-of-the-mill porn imagery gives way to a giant cartoon babe, who
offers a variety of scenarios from a menu, including "poker game,"
"princess of
Alas, this isn't the way things
continue. It soon becomes clear that the computer screen we're watching (and
that we remain watching throughout the film -- it's the only perspective we
get) multitasks as computer, video phone and security camera. We're in the
future, but it's the future as conceived from a Gallic perspective, with
painfully bright colors, facial tattoos both permanent and temporary and the
oddest hairstyles this side of a George Lucas movie (imagine The Fifth
Element on a Blair Witch budget, and you're halfway there).
And Thomas is an intense agoraphobe, unable to even look at images of the outdoors
without panicking, but thanks to technological advancements and a rich pension
attained from a previous job, he never has to try to
leave his apartment, which we're told has a hydroponic
garden and an aquarium. Avoiding his mother's phone calls (one of which
interrupts the cybersex that kicks things off),
Thomas' only human contact is via video conferencing with his psychologist
(Frederic Topart), a bald, goateed man with a large
Arabic letter imprinted on his forehead.
The psychologist's latest idea
is essentially that Thomas needs to get some action, so he signs him up with
both a dating agency and a government service that provides prostitutes to
severely handicapped individuals (opponents of health care, take note!). The
dating service is even more moronic than such things tend to be in our time,
with a questionnaire that consists of showing the participant fractal images
and asking if they look like the Brussels-Strasbourg transport, a dog or a
child's sexual organ, and so forth. Based upon only five such
questions, Thomas is matched up with several unsuitable mates, most of whom
tune out when they realize they'll never be allowed into his apartment, nor get
him to leave.
Only one female seems somewhat
compatible -- Melodie (Magali
Pinglaut), a hippie-dippy youngster who makes video
poems about her feet. She accepts that everyone has problems,
and even ventures into the world of cybersex, with
not-quite satisfactory results. Thomas being the multitasker
that he is, also pursues Eva (Aylin
Yay), the only government prostitute who looks to be
more than a mere sex object.
There are certainly some
ambitious conceptual ideas at work here, especially the notion of a main
character whose eyes we see through, albeit only when they're on his personal viewscreen. It's an idea that hasn't been used very much
since Lady in the Lake, Robert Montgomery's 1947 experiment with the
Raymond Chandler novel, and as it turns out, there's a good reason for that:
It's really hard to relate to a protagonist we never see, especially one as
tight-lipped as Thomas. He never gives us any hint, for instance, of how he came down with agoraphobia eight years previously, nor
of what makes him so ready to fall in love now to the point where, once
rejected, he can immediately transfer that love onto someone else. The script,
by Philippe Blasband (he wrote the vastly superior
yet equally mundanely titled An Affair of Love -- both films might have
put off prospective viewers who feared they were leaden Miramax-y romances),
forces plot points to accelerate the story, condensing relationships that would
take weeks to unfold into a couple of phone calls.
The
symbolism is obvious -- people put up barriers and have trouble connecting in
this modern world. And -- guess what -- some folks spend more time than is
healthy on the computer instead of making human contact! Message received, guys. Now show us some people who actually react
in a manner that resembles recognizable people, and maybe we'll be hooked. In
the meantime, Center of the World portrays a much more believable
example of what happens when a computer nerd realizes that his erotic fantasies
aren't the same thing as love.