Your Friends and Neighbours

Your Friends & Neighbors is at times an awfully funny film, and it features scathingly intelligent dialogue delivered by a talented cast. Six urbanites use ostensible ties of love and friendship to rip each other apart. Weasily academic Jerry (Stiller) propositions Mary (Amy Brenneman), the ostensibly happily married wife of his old friend Barry (Eckhart). Jerry's live-in girlfriend Terri (Keener) is carrying on a fling on the side with comely art-gallery employee Cheri (Nastassja Kinski), while Cary (Patric) uses and abuses his was through a string of women (sending a bogus letter informing an old girlfriend that she's been exposed to AIDS is one of his milder pranks).

The cast is perfect but Jason Patric (proving he is an actor to be reckoned with after the regrettable Speed 2) stands out as the brooding misogynist Cary, taping his own efforts at impressive coital chit-chat and then playing them back to himself later during his daily workout.

This is not a film for the faint-hearted. Anyone who saw LaBute's debut In The Company Of Men (shown last year) should expect more of the same. Audiences who don't like it quite this rough are likely to feel a bit used and abused themselves by the time Your Friends & Neighbors reaches its supremely cynical climax.

Proving LaBute is no fluke but a ferociously talented filmmaker to look out for, Your Friends & Neighbors is a movie with an unforgiving impact, and was the subject of great controversy in the States where the American classification board at first slapped it with an NC-17 rating (perhaps as an oblique tribute to its power), even though the film contains very little nudity and no physical violence. On appeal, it got an R. It's easily one of the best films of the year and probably the worst date movie since Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer.

Simon C. Williams