A Four Letter Word (R) ***
By Tirdad Derakhshani, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Is love just another four-letter word? That's the question that haunts Casper Andreas' well-crafted, deceptively light-'n'-fluffy romantic comedy.
Filled with some witty (and raunchy) one-liners, A Four Letter Word follows three couples as they struggle to translate having sex into feeling L-O-V-E, into making a life together.
The film's epicenter is Luke (played by Jesse Archer, who cowrote the script with Andreas), a pretty 20-something gay party boy who spends all his energy trying to prove he's so footloose and fancy free, he's unhauntable by any question or person.
Luke is the stereotypical swishy, sex-obsessed gay man who seems pathologically incapable of taking anyone or anything seriously. But his life takes an unexpected turn when he finds himself groping Stephen in the back of a bar. He likes Stephen, a straight-acting, confident dude who says he's a trust-fund boy whose passion is to be a painter. Stephen rocks Luke's world. Luke contemplates monogamy for the first time ever.
But before long, Luke finds out that Stephen has a secret life. Can he trust Stephen?
The same sort of predicament befalls the other two couples in the film: Luke's friend Peter, an ultra-serious guy obsessed with commitment, asks his lover, Derek, to move in with him, only to find that they don't get along.
And Peter's friend Marilyn, a ''sexually confused, obsessive-compulsive control freak,'' is swept off her feet when her boyfriend, Bart, proposes marriage. But she's not excited so much by Bart as by the idea of marriage.
Andreas rescues A Four Letter Word from being merely a raunchy lil' romance by showing how his characters are steeped in a culture of therapy that has filled Americans with endless, compulsive self-analysis and self-doubt.
Luke and Marilyn are stuck. In a culture preaching that they are individuals in control of their destinies, they are also bombarded by the idea that they are never in control, that they are powerless in the face of their desires.
''I'm not even sure there is such a thing as love,'' Luke says, in a rare moment of lucidity. ''What our society refers to as love seems to be all about power struggles and addiction.'' Not too shabby for a frivolous party boy in a frivolous romantic comedy.
Cast: Charlie David, Cory Grant, Jesse Archer, J.R. Rolley
Director: Casper Andreas
Screenwriter: Casper Andreas, Jesse Archer
Producers: Casper Andreas, Markus Goetze
An Emblem release. Running time: 87 minutes. Explicit sex scenes, profanity, nudity.
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