Unique: a romantic comedy with no sympathetic characters. This is supposed to be a movie with a clever twist, that feelings and events are revealed by notes left on a refrigerator (hence the magnets in the title). Well, it works, since the protagonists' actions and conversations come across as self-indulgent and childish, as one dimensional as the paper with which they "reveal" themselves. It's not about having commitment issues, like a lot of rom-coms, but about people not knowing that there exists an emotional and psychological domain beyond the one attached to their genitals. The characters are all written to be quirky – the male lead (Bilodeau) is a musician who tries to communicate the passionate expressions of Herbert von Karajan, but he's only playing a Theremin (it has a pair of antennae that emit a magnetic field connected to an amp that produces sounds when the player modifies the field by waving his hands; sorry for the details, but hand-waving and no metaphoric touching are what this movie is about); the women are physically unattractive, mostly because they react aggressively to almost every situation, whatever the psychological register), but dress like a cross between Gypsies and bohemians, I guess to impress us that they "really", beneath the shrewish exterior, have taste and an aesthetic sensibility. It's all a mish-mash. The only constant is an undertone of emotional whinging as people manoeuvre to satisfy their (mostly sexual) desires in the most direct and primeval manner possible. They lie, they cheat, they can't communicate, and we are supposed to buy into this because they are flippant, "artists", or simply unbound by convention? Really? I thought the 60s and 80s were over. Some people have mentioned the lighting and decor, which are technically well-executed, but it only seems to underline the emotional shallowness and intellectual impotence of the characters. It would be acceptable if the movie (and I guess this is the director's fault) didn't take itself and its themes so seriously. There is no real humour, so I don't know how this got slotted into the comedy genre, except that people weave webs of lies to betray one another. Unlike other examples, however, we can't really identify with any character. These people aren't caught between conflicting emotions. The only motivation seems to be that they only have one set of genitals, so I guess it's hard slogging getting connected to everyone. The whole thing seems like an attempt by a provincial theatrical company to play Shakespeare, except Macbeth is a horny plumber, and its Woody Allen who's being ripped off, not the Bard.
