“Love” stories that take place in Los Angeles are, of course, rather rare. Mainly because it is not a city that one tends to find “romantic.” Even if you are as L.A.-loving as Eve Babitz. It is a city where people go to allow themselves be fucked–by strangers and an industry–but not really loved. One supposes that’s why 1991’s L.A. Story (written by and starring Steve Martin) is such a rare gem, exploring–albeit satirically–the distinctly absurd experience that occurs when falling in love in L.A. When La La Land came along in 2016, it was rarer still: a “serious” movie–even if a musical–about the miraculous unearthing of true love in L.A. Naturally set within the framework of both parties being aspiring in the fields of film and music.
With 2017’s It Happened in L.A. (which followed a year later on the heels of La La Land), the tone is quite different, taking a more realistic approach to relationships in this particular city rather than a magical realism one (as was the case in L.A. Story and La La Land). The neurosis and verbosity of our heroine, Annette (Michelle Morgan, a Blair Waldorf look-alike who pulled an Orson Welles by writing, directing and starring), gives the film a decided Woody Allen tinge–we won’t say New York, as there is nothing of that city here… other than an Allen-esque script structure and tone. Annette’s dissatisfaction with her long-time boyfriend, a TV writer named Elliot (Jorma Taccone) who pays for her existence, starts to make her wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t try her luck with another man who might make her feel less, well, annoyed. Being that Annette and Elliot are that rare Los Angeles breed–a couple who has actually been together for five years–Annette’s best friend, Baker (Dree Hemingway), is not sold on her decision.
At the same time, Annette isn’t one for taking advice from Baker, who has something of a “spotty” track record with men. This includes Tom (Tate Donovan), an older man whose new house she was tasked with decorating before they ended up falling into bed together. Though certainly not in love–at least not on Tom’s part. Annette’s general harshness grows even more so when directed at something or someone specific, thus Baker chooses to keep the information about continuing to see Tom to herself, while Annette deliberates further on what she ought to do about her relationship with Elliot. The clincher comes in two ways, first when he asks her to help take in the trash and she finds it to be a disgusting display of his codependency, as it’s clearly a one-person job. The second comes at a party where the hostess, Frankie (Corinne Kingsbury), is getting in deep conversation with Baker about why she didn’t invite Annette. In the previous scene, at a yoga class, Annette demanded, “Frankie’s having a game night and she didn’t invite me?” We then cut to Frankie asking Baker at the party, “Why would I invite her here when I know she hates games.” This will be a long-running bit throughout the film: Annette’s contempt for games. As she tells it to Michael (Antonio Cupo) and Nora (Nora Zehetner), another couple friend unit at the party, “I don’t like most games, but specifically those geared toward five to twelve year olds. In the 80s, during my parents’ divorce, they used Milton Bradley a lot as a diversion tactic so they could go in their room and scream about my father’s affair with his secretary. So it kinda takes me to a pretty dark place.”
Her assessment of Michael and Nora as being infinitely happier based on the fact that she’s going away with him on location (because they simply can’t be apart) while he shoots a movie in Vancouver leads her to break up with Elliot that very night when they’re in bed together. So it is that Elliot’s cinematic interpretation of their love is dashed. Something that harkens back to the beginning of the movie, during which idyllic postcards of L.A. are showcased to the tune of Hurricane Smith’s “Oh, Babe What Would You Say.” Almost “Parisian” in flavor, the picturesqueness is interrupted with a cut to the opening scene in which Annette declares, “I’m telling you guys, that girl is a prostitute.” She says this of a woman sitting at a bar with an older man and appearing endlessly interested in everything he has to say. The great disease of “love in L.A.” is thusly represented as a problem of living in a town where expectations are all the higher because of everyone’s collective syndrome about believing that romance should feel like a movie, yet at the same time, knowing full well that the bulk of the population within the county confines is made up of douchebags and vacuous slores. Hence, the great war within when it comes to seeking romance in the City of Angels that so often feels like the City of Demons.
Elliot finds himself in just such a case in point when he agrees to go to a party (as you can tell, people just have parties at their house in L.A. because driving drunk to multiple locations is a bitch) thrown by his lead actor on the show he writes for, Haggard’s Landing. As he was told, he’s in a much different position now as a successful Hollywood bigshot than when he first started dating Annette and was a nobody. Yet the actress who fawns over him is just the sort you would expect to see lampooned in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as she warns Elliot, “Just so you know, I usually cry during sex… but it has nothing to do with you.” A quintessential thing for a damaged goods actress (with a middling part) to say.
Throwing in the towel on the party, Elliot walks past Playboy Liquor (or Pla-Boy, if you prefer) on Yucca Street and into the usual place he goes to have dinner with Annette, where he orders a burger and a Sazerac. The aforementioned prostitute approaches and tells him the burger is shit and that he should get the steak sandwich. She then cancels the order for him to get him the better option. He surrenders to her dominance, which continues to radiate when she asserts, “Hands can never be too clean.” She says this, like some sort of pandemic prophet, while offering him hand sanitizer that she forces him to receive in his palm.
As Baker and Tom find themselves evermore in a Carrie and Mr. Big dynamic, right down to a couch being used as a metaphor for him being forced to commit to something he doesn’t really like, she realizes what a fool she’s been making of herself (as Annette already told her), walking out of his house with the responsibility of paying six thousand dollars for a custom-made sofa she can’t return. Her emotional distress leads her to call upon her cousin, Peter (Kentucker Audley), for comfort, as he’s been more present in her life since he moved to back L.A., with seemingly empty promises about setting her up with a co-worker named Scott. It’s with this plot thread that things definitely push the boundaries of “comedy of manners” indeed and go toward places even Woody Allen has never dared to.
Meanwhile, as Annette has quickly dipped her toe into the dating pool with a backup guy who has been lingering in her mind for a while, Ben (Robert Schwartzman, yes Jason Schwartzman’s brother and the love interest in The Princess Diaries), she finds herself suddenly making justifications for the new guy she thinks might be boyfriend material. Justifications she never would have made for Elliot as she tells Baker with a straight face, “His real passion is improvisational comedy.”
As the strange occurrences that can only happen in L.A. (ergo the title of the movie) when it comes to chance encounters of the l’amour-oriented kind make Annette start to see that maybe Elliott wasn’t so bad, he himself becomes involved with the very prostitute Annette called out at the outset of the story. How very Pretty Woman (another classic in the distinctly Los Angeles pantheon of “romantic” movies that are actually quite loveless and depressing when you get even vaguely beneath the surface).
But then there is something that proves love in L.A. is real, and not just a backlot illusion. Albeit love of a different kind. For the majority of people in Los Angeles tend to have a shared appreciation for pop culture, or at least an awareness of its inherent value to the town. Thus, Morgan ends the credits with the quite lovely sentiment, “For my dad, who loved movies.” As someone who herself grew up in L.A. (sure, Thousand Oaks by way of Santa Monica counts), she surely knows all the ins and outs of the incongruity that is “romance” in El Pueblo de Los Angeles. Perhaps better than any of the transplants who move there, who can’t quite see the ridiculousness with as much of an objective eye. But that farcical quality is disseminated clearly on the screen with this feature. And, if nothing else, an Angeleno can surely be made to understand something via a screen. Even if that something is his own preposterousness.
