A Love Affair of Sorts | Film review

Did David Guy Levy kill the Flip camera? Conventional wisdom is that the once-trendy device was rendered obsolete by the latest generation of smartphones. Yet having sat through A Love Affair of Sorts, which is being advertised as the first (and probably last) feature-length movie shot entirely on the Flip, I’m inclined to offer an alternate explanation: Execs at Cisco took one look at Levy’s mind-numbingly tedious indie and opted to halt production, to spare us further adventures in commercial-grade navel-gazing.

Mugging relentlessly for his pocket-sized camera like a pudgy Jim Halpert, Levy himself stars as an amateur artist who, in the most improbable meet-cute of all time, picks up a Hungarian hottie (Bordán) at a local bookstore after filming her in the act of shoplifting. The two quickly embark on a joint experiment in round-the-clock exhibition. “I don’t know who I am!” Levy bellows later, though his existential crisis is nothing a little Swanbergian snogging can’t fix.

If all of this seems a tad contrived, Levy’s way ahead of you: His budding romance is really (spoiler!) a film-within-a-film, with Affair’s meta last act devoted to an unrequited (though equally stilted) director-starlet love story. The blurring of lines between documentary and fiction is meant to inspire lots of burning questions, but only one leaps to mind: How the hell did this god-awful thing make it off the Flip and into theaters?