Valentine’s Day is upon us, but the release of this film by Kim Longinotto is a disappointing and uninteresting way of marking that fact. It is a miscellaneous montage of film clips from the past century, accompanied by music from Richard Hawley, on the vague subject of … love. There are archive fragments from documentaries, romances, and grisly and puritanical sex-education films (of the kind anthologised by the BFI in its boxset The Joy of Sex Education). There are bits from the 1929 silent movie Piccadilly starring Anna May Wong, and from My Beautiful Laundrette. It seems as if anything and everything could have been included. But the selections and juxtapositions are neither interesting nor insightful – certainly not compared to, say, Julien Temple’s recent essay London: The Modern Babylon or Charlie Lyne’s study of teen movies, Beyond Clueless. It’s all rather nebulous.
