Singles

directed by Cameron Crowe, playing at Loews Fresh Pond

Perhaps some Seattle mid-twenty-year-olds are unattractive, undersexed, and less than-spunky.

Such personages, however, got lost on the way to the casting of Singles, Cameron Crowe's slick new romance cum comedy cum melodrama.

Here we find only Matt Dillons, Bridget Fondas, and similarly nubile and sexy twentysomethings. We may never sport such beauty, but we relate to these characters because they veg and stress and pig out in front of the tv, like we're all supposed to do.

Crowe devotes most of the two hours to Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) and Steve (Campbell Scott). Steve busies himself with engineering an atmospherically beneficent supertrain to unclog his beloved city's roads. Linda's environmental organization saves the world.

Following the aforementioned cool-profession theme, Cliff performs as the lead singer of a Soundgarden-esque band typical of the Seattle music scene. Likewise, Debbie and Janet run a de rigeur cafe that serves as the pack's home base and a focal point for the film, a la the Bensonhurst coffee shop in Jungle Fever.

These characters--close friends and/or neighbors--inhabit a low rise apartment complex, a universe where the search for good sex and satisfying relationships dominates all else.

The relationships between the three couples--Steve and Linda, Cliff (Matt Dillon) and Janet (Bridget Fonda), and Debbie (Sheila Kelley) and sundry computer dates--meander, heat up, cool down, and plateau.

Janet's central concern is that she excite Cliff. She even considers a breast enlargement operation as a means to satisfy him.

Debbie hasn't yet matured emotionally enough to either sustain a relationship like Linda and Steve's or reconsider one like Janet does. Instead, she provides a comical foil to the others.

Though platonic themes occasionally move us, the sexual themes consistently engender the funniest jokes. Like Crowe's other films, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Say Anything, Singles is a film whose lewd lines innumerable adolescents will memorize and chew as cud. One of the more long-lasting laughs comes after Steve, in a childhood flashback, confuses spam with sperm while discussing procreation with the boys.

Beyond one-liners, Crowe has crafted an innovative, creative film. First, he teases the audience by undermining their expectations of sequence.

Risky technique number two: Crowe lets the characters introduce themselves to the audience. They salute us with ingratiating monologues fraught with relational angst.

Third, Crowe makes the garage door opener serve as a consistent symbol of attachment. The set decorator (Clay Griffith) and set designer (Cosmas Demetriou) manage to place this middle class prop within easy grabbing distance anytime a character is about to propose a commitment.

Since the acting is superb and since Crowe both wrote and directed Singles, only he can be blamed for any shortcomings. One flaw is his attempt to incorporate too much into his characters' lives. He neglects to flesh out subplots like Janet's breast enlargement, Linda's miscarriage, and her month-long environmental trip to Alaska.

Semi-petty protestations aside, Singles is an intelligent film that delivers an apolitical portrayal of contemporary urbanites. It offers little by way of metaphysical beef that we might digest, but it does resolve that handsome, white, comfortable, post-college white Seattlites can cultivate healthy male/female friendships both with and without fooling around.

Crowe sets his film Today, 1992. Surely someday arty sociologists and assorted academicians will lecture about how Singles serves as "a timely representation of relational folkways in the immediate postcold war Pacific Northwest." Undergraduates will ponder whether good-looks and Seattle correlate or coincide.

Both, perhaps. Decide after you see it.