The film tells the story, which is as old as civilization: the adventures of humans, purportedly intelligent creatures, who decided to subordinate their lives to marriage, the strangest institution ever created by this civilization.
The leading characters are Ukrainian women and American men who look for partners with the help of international dating agencies. Los Angeles-based film director Jonathon Narducci (started his career with music videos and short films; his works have been shown at film festivals in Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, Atlanta; Love Me is his full-length film debut) distinguishes six men, five Americans and an Australian, and traces their attempts to find wives in far-away Ukraine, which a terra incognita for them. The website of the agency is a paid one; not only have they to pay for placing the announcements, but also for adding photos, sending and even receiving messages. The candidates buy a special tour to travel across the country, stop for special parties, where they meet women or come to the dates they have appointed on the website. Narducci follows the characters to Odesa, Kyiv, and Kherson, and shoots at their homes.
On the whole, these are lonely white men, middle-aged or older, who are divorced or who have been unable to settle their personal lives. Their motivation is more or less apparent, but everything is not so clear with women, because their situations are shown mainly through the eyes of the men, in the paradigm of traditional patriarchal family.
Out of several stories, only one has a 100 percent happy ending, with a wedding and a birth of a child, – the director presents it in the end. But this is less interesting than the variety of ways used by Ukrainian women to deceive foreigners. Someone is actively exchanging messages on a paid website, receiving a commission for every letter and avoiding a personal meeting, whereas the unlucky candidate loses thousands of dollars. Others play real shows where they involve the police to skin the credulous finance of money to pay an invented debt. Someone even agrees for a false wedding only to take the children from the previous marriage to Bali.
However, the story is crowned by an emotional visual act of grace for everyone – the young and the old, the Ukrainians and the foreigners, rascals, and righteously indignant – in the long range of frontal portraits. From a many-character and multilayer topic the director gets a bittersweet picture, like a bar of chocolate, an adventurous comedy with moderately apt humor and conditionally happy ending. The film does not touch upon the reasons that cause the marriage emigration or use dishonest methods: it shows merely chronicles of the club of lonely hearts in the 7/24 Internet, nothing more than that.
This is not a grandiose film, but it is quite ingenious: everyone needs love and almost everyone needs money. Narducci decides to leave the last word for love.
Six losers go to an unsuccessful country for happiness. It could be worse than that.
The Ukrainian audience will be able to see Love Me in Kyiv’s movie theaters Kyiv and Kinopanorama, as well as in Lviv (Palats Mystetstv, Kinopalats-Kopernyk, Lviv Film Centre), Dnipropetrovsk (Pravda-Kino) and Kharkiv (8 S).
