Hot Docs: Love Me Review
LOVE ME (2013)
Director: Jonathon Narducci
Country: USA
Genre: Documentary
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Note: The following review is part of our coverage of the 2014 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival. For more information please visit hotdocs.ca or follow Hot Docs on Twitter.
At a time when American politicians are sat around fiercely thinking about the crisis in Ukraine, another group of Americans has beaten them to it by dedicating their lives to Ukraine in another way – Mail order brides…
Love Me from documentarist Jonathon Narducci follows the tribulations of six lonely hearts looking for love on the internet and finding it on a website called A Foreign Affair (AFA). The mind bogglingly complicated website, which looks like an early 2000s soft core porn site, allows users to browse profiles of Eastern European, “Latin” and Asian women that are (supposedly) desperate to marry Western men and then join a group holiday to meet them in person.
A film like this would be easy to mock, [...] but it is not always the clients that come across negatively. [...] my judgment is more reserved for the company that exploits the men over the lonely men themselves.
The founder of AFA is half-entrepreneur, half-lothario John Adams, an uncharismatic ‘average Joe’ from Arizona who met his wife Tanya on a Russian “Love Tour”. He hosts an online webcast trying to sell holidays to lonely men, which consist of a whistle-stop tours of Ukrainian nightclubs and hotels to mingle with eligible women – the only problem is that his clients aren’t exactly the best bachelors so John has to give them speed dating advice along the way.
The service (AFA) proclaims itself to be about finding love (or ‘the one’), but one user openly admits in the film that he ‘picked 10 women he liked’ before writing to them all. This hardly implies love at first sight…
A film like this would be easy to mock, especially as Narducci gains intimate access to the tour and is present during some truly excruciating moments, but it is not always the clients that come across negatively. For the privilege of talking to these women and for translation services, AFA charges $10 per message that is sent back and forth – so some of these men end up spending over $10,000 during their ‘courting’ period, and ultimately have reservations about the validity of the conversations. So my judgment is more reserved for the company that exploits the men over the lonely men themselves.
The documentary is focused primarily on the American men than the Eastern European women, but the questions that I really wanted to be answered but wasn’t, was simply: why is marriage so important in Eastern Europe? And what gives American companies the right to profit from this insecurity?
70/100 ~ GOOD. The documentary is focused primarily on the American men than the Eastern European women, but the questions that I really wanted to be answered but wasn’t, was simply: why is marriage so important in Eastern Europe? And what gives American companies the right to profit from this insecurity?
