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A Perfect Pairing
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Light comedies – and especially romantic comedies –
stay very close to the type of daily gossip, chatter, anxieties and desires
that fill social media: the lifestyle issues that once were the sole province
of glossy magazines. In the Netflix rom-com feature A Perfect Pairing directed by Australian expatriate Stuart
McDonald, a splendid selection of buzzwords zip by: “work/life balance”, “toxic
workplace culture”, female best friends who are “work wives”, “added value”, “telling
the story of your product”, “going the extra mile” in business negotiations …
When did such matters of working conditions and
business success infiltrate the rom-com genre? In some sense, they have never
been absent: Hollywood classics including George Cukor’s Holiday (1938), Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) and Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) have always dealt with the working lives of
their characters – or, at any rate, the money required to free one from an
unsatisfying job and face life as an unfolding adventure.
By the 1950s, movies such as Desk Set (1957) with Katharine Hepburn, or any number of Doris Day/Rock
Hudson vehicles tiding us over into the 1960s, explored, with some ambivalence,
the opportunities for women entering the Mad
Men-type industries opened up by technological growth and the explosion of
consumer markets.
There can be no doubt, however, that, beginning around
the moment of 9 to 5 (1980) – directed
and co-written by another Aussie expat, Colin Higgins (1941-1988) – work and
business became defining, almost all-determining topics for relationship
comedies. That covers a vast range of films, from Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin
in Big Business (1988) to Sandra
Hüller in Maren Ade’s splendid Toni
Erdmann (2016).
Lola (Victoria Justice) in A Perfect Pairing is someone who loves her work in Los Angeles,
which involves selling wines to restaurant chains. In fact, she enters into a
storytelling rhapsody at the first swill of a good brand, evoking its origin,
its history, its destiny, as well as the places, times and feelings with which
it can be associated. She’s a hard worker, regularly going above and beyond the
strict call of duty – but the job is, to her, a source of immense pleasure and
even creativity.
Does that sound like a fantasy to you, a Utopian wish?
Welcome to the contemporary rom-com, which proudly traffics in dreamlike
solutions to real, shared problems – as much popular art does.
It’s not all smooth sailing for Lola. She has a
narcissistic power-baby of a boss, Calder (Craig Horner), who is a type – the
type to avoid – straight out a hundred current self-help manuals. An equally
familiar figure is the nervy office gal-pal, Audra (Lucy Durack), who genuinely
supports her best friend Lola until a sure-fire business opportunity
necessitates an act of betrayal. Them’s the breaks in the modern workplace!
Going it alone – because this is also a fable of
independence and small business start-ups – Lola grabs the opportunity to fly
to Queensland and fight for the chance to represent the wines produced by Hazel
Vaughn (Samantha Cain), a tough and very wealthy lady who happens to be hanging
out on her down-home sheep farm. To impress Hazel, Lola will have to roll up
her sleeves and become an earthy, no-nonsense ‘jillaroo’ of all trades.
So where is the rom in this com? As a 21st century working girl, we are told, Lola hasn’t had great success in love, and
frankly isn’t devoting much time or energy to it anymore; business acumen is
more important to her. Australia is set to change this situation. The first gag
in this section of the film, among its best, shows Lola’s instant hots for the
first sstrapping Aussie male who greets her as she emerges from a cab – a guy
who instantly reveals himself to be, literally, a fall-down drunkard.
Lola has a better chance at romance, one safely
assumes, with the pragmatic, laconic but deeply sensitive farm manager, Max
(Adam Demos) – especially when he gets his shirt off in the course of a hard
day’s work. (Demos, it should be noted, also featured in a broadly similar rom-com
project from the same producer-and-writers team, Falling Inn Love [2019] – that one was shot in New Zealand.) Max,
however, has a secretive side, and some mysterious emotional wounds. To go any
further into plot matters (tightly scripted by Elizabeth Hackett & Hilary
Galanoy) would spoil the twists that are in store as part of this set-up.
But there’s a lot here to embroider the basic
storyline, and McDonald keeps it all ticking over briskly (montage sequences
proliferate!). Although the ‘naïve foreigner on a sheep station’ premise uses
all the in-built gags that have been in filmic circulation since at least Fred
Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960),
and the habitual linguistic-cultural misunderstandings arise (Lola wonders what
an ‘arvo’ is), there are also plenty of intriguing New World touches.
Gone is the mainly male, straight, white-Australian
image we recall from Sunday Too Far Away (1975) and its ilk; this is a relaxed rural community that welcomes lesbian and
indigenous workers. An Aussie Utopia, indeed!
Every romantic comedy depends, for its success or
failure, on the hard-to-pinpoint but palpable chemistry – or lack thereof –
between the lead players. This film scores pretty well on that front. Justice
takes on the burden of the performance duty, since she inhabits not only the
love plot, but also the Los Angeles plot and the cute ‘solitary relating to
animals’ scenes.
Demos is more constrained, since his strong-and-silent
type also has to be kept away from the camera, at crucial points, for the
narrative mechanics to function smoothly. Nonetheless, once the beers flows and
the proximity-clinches kick in, Lola and Max make for an appealing
couple-in-the-making. (Lola’s Dad [Antonio Alvarez], on the other hand, looks
like he should be her brother.)
In its emphasis on landscape and physical labour, A Perfect Pairing brings a welcome touch
of the outdoorsy, Romancing the Stone (1984) strain of rom-com to the usual urban settings of the genre – and Ben
Nott’s luminous cinematography rises to the occasion. But the project does not
reoly on any old-fashioned appeal to supposedly primitive ways of life in the
outback; present and accounted for on this farm are Internet communications, nocturnal
sing-alongs to groovy pop tracks, and even a move to eco-friendly practices.
My ears pricked up at the mention, early on in the
story, of a winemaking “all-women collective in Uruguay” on which Lola has her
eye. Thirty or even ten years ago, this would have been, in almost any
Australian film or TV comedy, a throwaway joke at the expense of what is deemed
to be an entirely obscure, little country, and some supposedly trendy fad (such
as feminism!) deemed politically correct – therefore, a pretentious wank. Not
so here. This Latin American female collective constitutes a minor, unseen but
significant thread woven through the narrative, and is granted maximum
positivity. That impressed me.
Stuart McDonald is a filmmaker whose career I have
followed since his early 1990s shorts (Mr
Electric [1993] starring Ernie Dingo), through noted Australian TV series
(including The Secret Life of Us and Summer Heights High), and into
high-profile USA TV work – especially 12 episodes of the sublime Rachel Bloom cult-phenomenon, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015-2019). Since A Perfect Pairing, he has been involved with making an interactive TV
rom-com (again for Netflix) titled Choose
Love due for release in 2023.
Please understand that I have so far restrained myself
from making any “McDonald had a farm” puns in relation to A Perfect Pairing.
But there you go.
Note: This, in a
different version, was the final review I did for the Australian online
publication Screenhub, capping an almost
three-and-a-half-year run under the kind editorial guidance of Rochelle
Siemienowicz. When she left the job, I was informed that my film reviews
“struggle to reach 20 hits” with the target readership, and so I took my leave.
Ah, the life of a freelance film critic!
© Adrian Martin May 2022 |
