The Perfect Man (DVD) - Romantic Comedy Movie for Date Night & Girls' Night In

Van Oostrum gives us a feast for the soul and the eyes. Stunning performances by both Mr. Schrieber and Ms. Tripplehorn in a marvelously photographed film makes this a ride well worth it's time and money. I couldn't say it any better than Mr. Hunt did in the Stand Magazine. Allow me to share. "A Perfect Man, in its elliptical presentation of its characters' lives, brings to mind the latter-day films of Philippe Garrel, but Van Oostrum's genre experimentation aligns him with Paul Verhoeven, a didactic prankster who recognizes an audience's affinity for genre comforts and delivers them so vehemently that the line between sincerity and irony is blurred. Van Oostrum does the same thing here, but with reckless abandon, the film heedlessly switching between embroiled sex drama and light sex comedy, its characters' moods oscillating from frenzied to disaffected and back again. Like Verhoeven, Van Oostrum doesn't shy away from artifice for the sake of realism; he amplifies artifice to reveal the inherent inefficiency of reducing human relations to generic emotional cues. In other words, A Perfect Man is an autocritique, pathologically sexualized a la Basic Instinct yet comically subversive, indulging in formula so vigorously that it eventually resembles abstraction."