Love and Human Remains

Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love was praised as a play, but here, adapted for the screen, it seems much ado about very little. It's full of big issues, but what's said about them is less substantial, provocative or witty than in Arcand's previous attempt to monitor the contemporary pulse, Jesus of Montreal. The film centres on two flat-sharing friends: actor/writer David (Gibson), a manipulative bisexual cynic, and book-reviewer Candy (Marshall), whose quest for romance leaves her torn between a barman and a woman met at the gym. Add a dominatrix, a teenage busboy with a crush on David, a transvestite and others, and you have a fashionable cross-section of young Montreal - but which, if any, is the serial killer terrorising the city? Unfortunately, it's a half-hearted mystery. The characters are so unsympathetic, and the tone so determinedly cool, that the movie ends up as cautious and emotionally tepid as the behaviour it depicts. Not bad, but certainly not very likeable or illuminating.