Great music, really liked the female lead, but felt nothing for the male lead. Interesting film though, felt real.

Honest.

Tender.

Warm.

Outrageous.

Controversial.

Sweet.

Unusual.

Beautiful.

This was a genuinely moving, interesting and unique film.

Dos Santos has made a film about young people that is neither dumb and misogynistic nor dishonest and patronising.

People have sex, they get drunk, they fall in love, they feel things, they lose things, they lose themselves, the find themselves, they laugh, they cry...they live. This is all shown, beautifully and with great care.

The people who write the blurbs for these films are under a great deal of pressure to condense 90 minutes of films into as entertaining and brief a way as possible but to throw in the names of Gondry and Kar-wei is inaccurate and a bit lazy.

Dos Santos is, clearly, a director with his own vision and style...indeed in the post film discussion he talked of his inspirations being artists and books and not other films; that shows in this film.

A gem.

Unmade Beds is an evocative capture of transient post-student / early twenty-something life in a borderless European Economic Community. It has endearing main characters and plenty of nice quirky touches – only when you’re 22 could you start a relationship with someone without knowing their name or phone number. One suggests the next time to meet, the other the place – though I’m not quite sure where the money came from to finance the various (admittedly salubrious) hotel rooms.

Some of the plotting felt very original – such as the two leads unwittingly swopping jackets and mattresses before they finally meet. The ‘lost father/son’ sub-plot was weaker though - Axl shows a confidence in his interactions with his ‘Is-he-or-isn’t-he?’ dad that seems out of kilter with the more passive and subservient way he relates to his peers. That said, I thought the denouement of the relationship in question was nicely handled at the end.

The film is more of a study of the ebb and flow of casual encounters than it any kind of particularly satisfying story. By and large, it manages to avoid the more obvious clichés that come with the territory, although the occasional one slipped through the net. For example, the Romantic Away-Day Train-Trip cliché, “let’s just jump on any train and see where it goes.” Why do they never end up in somewhere really dull and godforsaken, like Bromley? (and if that leaves you thinking “why Bromley?”, just ask any AFC Wimbledon fan).

I wondered if it said something slightly vapid about the nature of a current hedonistic, nihilistic and experimental androgynous youth - and then thought that perhaps that said more about my middle aged, overly-exaggerated and sentimental memories of the importance of animal rights demonstrations in the mid-eighties. It probably does.

Overall, a winningly-sweet smile...and a little bit chaotic...and rambling...and all over the place 6/10.