Cinema 2011 #56: Last Night

Last Night, from Iranian-American writer-director Massy Tadjedin, is a film with as much artistic integrity as an IKEA catalogue. It is the glossy story of four impossibly beautiful people, living unreasonably fabulous lives in preposterously huge loft apartments in New York’s Upper East Side. Wedded couple Joanna and Michael, played by Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington, spend a day and a half wrestling with doubts over their hasty post-university marriage, while Eva Mendes and Guillaume Canet do their best to knowingly tempt them into infidelity.

Eva was somewhat annoyed he'd showed up wearing the same dress

The film is a classic example of style over substance, a beautifully shot and designed tribute to the refined tailoring of wealthy New York. In this post post-boom Manhattan, every character and frame is lit to perfection, and it is to their detriment. It is genuinely difficult to feel any sympathy for a Keira Knightley who spends an entire film stomping around the trendy hotspots of the city that never sleeps like some sort of petulant hat stand, trying to decide whether or not to french that dishy ex-boyfriend of hers while her hubby makes increasingly callous decisions with a colleague who thinks childhood OCD makes her kooky. What exactly is it that these characters want or hope to achieve beyond the inevitable pangs of guilt?

The film also drags, with Tadjedin spending far too much time with lingering shots of the characters suffering from ennui and this annoyingly banal bourgeois boredom only alienates the audience further from the heart of the story. In comparison, February’s Blue Valentine, another story of dissolving marriage, spoke volumes on the bitter heartache of separation as a couple’s unity was put to the test. Last Night, on the other hand, never even finds its voice.

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