It only hits you halfway through the movie, but when it does it’s with a wallop. Up until that point In Search of a Midnight Kiss has been a hipster rom-com, a low budget black-and-white date movie that’s part Linklater and part Kevin Smith, and set entirely in Lost Angeles on New Year’s Eve. Here, grungy indie-kid protagonist Wilson (Scoot McNairy) is bemoaning his single status and fretting about the night’s upcoming blind date with kooky wannabe starlet Vivian (Sara Simmonds). And yet, for their date they choose not movies, not food or dancing, but a lazy wander around the semi-deserted environs of downtown LA.
Here they talk, flirt and fight as they drift through the old theatre district, past the famous Wells Fargo Tower and the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, both eerily empty, both oddly atmospheric. The date peaks with a covert trip inside the ancient Orpheum Theatre (site of Judy Garland’s early stage turns), where the couple wax lyrical about the unused sites and unexplored legacy of LA. And then, suddenly, it hits you – this is not a movie about romance or introspective twentysomething angst. It is, instead, a revolutionary love letter to Los Angeles, and to the primal allure that the city holds over her residents.
Anyone who’s seen Thom Andersen’s epic 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, will know that, unlike New York, LA has been much maligned on screen in the past. It is used as a non-specific background for movie action (it hardly matters that Die Hard or Speed take place in LA – any city with, respectively, skyscrapers or a freeway would do). Or it is misrepresented as a locus of crime (from Double Indemnity to Pulp Fiction), or ethnic violence (Boyz in the Hood, Training Day), or entertainment industry drama (The Player, Get Shorty, LA Story). Even when the city is given a so-called character, as in Paul Haggis’ Crash or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia it is only to denigrate it as an alienating, unknowable and dehumanising place.
Which is why In Search of a Midnight Kiss is so unique. For this particular LA positively nurtures the romance of the two lonely characters on screen. Wilson and Vivian, though fragile and emotionally desolate, are never once bewildered by the city. They navigate it effortlessly, on the subway, by car and, most bizarrely, on foot. They are never mugged, gang-banged, caught up in cop killing or found lounging in a Hollywood drug den. Instead, their alienation comes entirely from within, while it is ultimately their beloved city – through a final reel traffic jam climax – that saves them from themselves.
