An in-competition west coast premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, writer-director Lovinder Gill’s Stalemate is an
unsophisticatedly sweet love triangle that unfolds in inoffensive
fashion, but ultimately just doesn’t have much of interest to say about
women, men or any of the mysterious and oftentimes necessary distance between them.

At the beginning of a particularly important and busy work week, advertising rep Kayleigh (Sheetal Sheth) tells long-time boyfriend Rich (Burgess Jenkins) that she wants a bit of a break, and doesn’t want to see him again until Friday, which is her birthday. Working up a promotional campaign for a minor league baseball team set to soon move into a new stadium, Kayleigh finds herself paired up with an outside contractor, the amiable Art (Josh Randall). He immediately loosens her up, dragging Kayleigh out of her (strangely deserted) office for a series of working lunches and dinners that slowly morph into something approaching dates. By the time Friday comes, and then that weekend, Kayleigh is on the verge of a full-blown existential crisis, torn between the two men in her life — one old and one new.

Set and filmed on location in Winston Salem, North Carolina, Stalemate wrings a bit of production value out of the (real) construction site of a local baseball stadium, but is otherwise flatly staged and shot. Most of its problems, however, relate directly to the material. Screen romances and love triangles need not be hopelessly complicated, or littered with ridiculous, unrealistic and over-the-top problems keeping boy and girl apart; witness the simple beauty of something like the heartrending Once, from a few years back. But Gill’s movie is thinly drawn (Kayleigh is stuffy and uptight because she has a Mercedes, nice furniture in her office, and works inside; Art is an appealing free spirit because he drives a Jeep, eats hot dogs, likes the outdoors and also plays guitar), and, while admirably adding some much-needed three-dimensionality to Rich as the film wears on, lacking in much insight or quality drama about what’s driven a wedge between the couple to begin with.

It also strikes an overall false chord by having Art object in pouty fashion to Kayleigh’s eventually stated desire to date both men for a while. Rich’s opposition is understandable, given their three-year history, but if there’s anything that the history of humankind has taught us, it’s that guys are cool with the potential for no-strings-attached sex, if that’s what a lady is offering. So when the men get together and talk, and then decide to jointly put an ultimatum to Kayleigh, it’s one of those bullshit cinematic fantasies, in which (predominantly) guys exorcise some demons about how they were romantically strung along in their formative years. Compounding all the falsity and awkwardness is the completely needless compression of time. Art’s a nice guy, yes, but four (chaste, part-time) days does not a grand love affair make.

Stalemate may not ultimately work, but what it does have going for it is Sheth, a knockout beauty whose eyes could and probably should be classified as weapons of mass distraction. Jenkins comes across as pretty shallow, an Abercrombie & Fitch himbo model, while Randall at least conveys a loose-limbed charisma that makes his scenes passably engaging. Sheth, however, gives Stalemate a soul, because even if she’s not given much with which to work, she both communicates romantic ambivalence and reminds viewers of that libidinal surge attached to flirtation and blooming attraction. In another era, she would have been a great silent film superstar; as is, head shots of her could likely be used as a major time-saver in therapy, to hypnotize patients. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Stalemate Productions, unrated, 89 minutes)

One of the common pitfalls of independent film comes by way of the navel-gazing that, perhaps somewhat understandably, a hard-grinding life of either on-the-fringe or upwardly mobile artistic endeavor engenders and encourages. Movies about would-be filmmakers or struggling actors and other artists are of course neither automatically good nor bad, but do often lose themselves in a thicket of puffed-up self-importance, mistaking their impediments and human efforts as somehow automatically more interesting than that of the so-called common man, and thus requiring of less dramatic lift.

Philadelphia-based filmmaker Jose Cruz, Jr.’s Close-Up falls victim to this problem, blending together the story of a couple of wayward, aspirant actors with an even more pedestrian drama about recovery, since the film’s main characters also happen to be recently on-the-wagon recuperating alcoholics. Shaun Paul Costello plays a guy hanging onto his three months of sobriety by the thinnest of margins; his wife (Jacqueline Schneider) is in the process of divorcing him and threatening to move off with their young daughter, no matter that he’s landed a job as a mechanic with a pal (Brian Gallagher), and is also consistently in touch with his sponsor (Brian Anthony Wilson). The audition circuit is tough, but this lonely guy finally lands a friend in the chirpy, flirty cousin of his sponsor, a girl he dubs “Free Bird” (Valentina Mohle). She calls him “Straggler,” meanwhile, and since this is something that characters in movies do, these nicknames stick — the only monikers of affiliation the audience is afforded for the leads.

An in-competition entry and west coast premiere at the recent Dances With Films festival, Close-Up has a certain technical proficience, or at least a solid scheme — comprised of handheld camerawork, and a lack of precious staging — that feeds its tone, and meandering narrative aims. But as a writer, Cruz seems to just be throwing bits and pieces of every sort of dramatic scenario at a wall, and hoping it somehow sticks in compelling fashion. Straggler’s desperate desire to reconnect with his daughter goes out the window after he gives her a Christmas gift, and Free Bird’s imminent departure is so undiscussed that one could be forgiven for forgetting it completely. The movie also only fitfully engages with the themes of addiction and recovery. Inclusive of its very on-the-nose dialogue, everything about Close-Up‘s dramatic conflict is perfunctory and uninspired, and there are false little details too (people drinking in the background at a party at the home of a recovering addict?) that become distracting, and derail certain scenes.

The performances here are functional — think of Costello as a sort of poor man’s Channing Tatum, early in his career — but far from gripping or involving, and Mohle in particular begins to grate after a short while. Sadly, no one in Close-Up (apart from Alan Ruck and Ryan Dunn, who pop up in small cameos) is really ready for their own close-up. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cruz Control Pictures, unrated, 85 minutes)