My Life Without Steve

Alone in a Sydney bedsit, a woman meditates on the loss of her lover to another woman. It's the usual thing: confusion, recrimination, guilt, fear, anger, loneliness. Finally, however, she takes a few tentative steps towards a rediscovery of her sense of self. It's structured as a monologue accompanied by crisp, painterly images of the narrator's apartment and its view over a bay, the rambling digressions (bursting with cultural references) clearly meant to represent an intensely relevant essay on romantic love and loss. But for all its worthy intentions, the movie suffers from fashionable, dilettante pretensions and from a dearth of humour that turns its narrator's liturgy of misery into a self-piteous wallow that fails to stir the emotions. Not a little irritating.