Guys, Girls and a Jerk
Comeuppance
There’s every chance in the world that you won’t ever see this movie, but I wanted to tell you about the first two scenes. The first scene takes place in a bar somewhere in Montreal; a guy and a girl are chatting. The girl is telling the guy all her secrets; the guy is listening and nodding intently. The second scene is in the girl’s bedroom after the guy has talked her into having sex. The guy is getting ready to leave; the girl asks him to stay. The guy — and you really have to see this to believe it — turns on her, sneering, making fun of her performance in bed, and generally behaving in a completely selfish, insensitive, and ill-mannered way.
Well, you can’t get away with that.
In an American movie, you really can’t do something like that at all outside of a Neil LaBute movie; main characters in American movies and television shows characters have to be, at bottom, likable. You can call this the “Hannibal Lecter Rule” if you like, but it’s true. (One of the few people to really break this rule was Paul Reiser in Aliens, and he had people hooting at him in the street for years.)
Vincent (Simon Boisvert), the jerk in Guys, Girls and a Jerk gets away with this, at least for awhile, because the movie is a French Canadian movie — in French, with English subtitles — and therefore not subject to the Hannibal Lecter Rule. This allows Vincent to slink through the entire movie, seeking who he might devour, lying to his faithful girlfriend, corrupting twelve-year-old boys, and generally acting in as sleazy and dishonest a manner as possible. Boisvert — who did the screenplay — does an excellent acting job here, making Vincent charismatic and charming without ever once making him likable.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the entire movie right there. Guys, Girls and a Jerk is an ultra-low-budget foreign independent flick, and consequently has all the production values of an old Three’s Company rerun. The movie is a series of conversations in cheap apartments and bars that either involve Vincent talking to someone in the large ensemble cast or members of the large ensemble cast talking about Vincent. (Fortunately, some of these conversations move into the bedroom, where you see considerably more skin than you ever got to see on Three’s Company.)
Guys, Girls and a Jerk even has the kind of plot you’d expect from a cheesy 70’s sitcom. Vincent comes up with the bright idea to start a dating service; he interviews the men, and lets a flunky interview the women - and then shows up as the first date for all the women. But its sensibility is much more modern and much more perverse; think of it as a two-hour episode of Friends where Ross sleeps with Monica. (Or better yet, don’t.)
The only thing - other than the bedroom scenes - that keep Guys, Girls and a Jerk going is the thought that somewhere, down the line, Vincent will get his comeuppance. That is what happens to jerks in movies; that is what we expect to happen. And it is largely what has to happen because Vincent is, really, asking for it, and in the best tradition of such movies, he helps engineer his own comeuppance.
This takes awhile, and since not much else happens, Guys, Girls and a Jerk is more than a little slow. Given that the scenery never changes much (don’t any of these people go outside?), it’s more than a little tedious, too. And since — despite its sitcom look and feel — it’s never that funny, the film turns out to be a dreary, dull experience.
Assuming that Guys, Girls and a Jerk ever shows up at a theater near you — and that’s a huge assumption — you might want to take a flyer on it. Not so much to see a jerk get his comeuppance, but to see a jerk in his natural habitat. It’s not something you get to see much in American film, and it’s certainly different. And it’s not any worse than, say, Gods and Generals, which at least is something.