Entangled (2019)

The old skits that they used to do on “Saturday Night Live” when Dan Aykroyd, in the guise of the eminent Leonard Pinth-Garnell, would present “Bad Performances,” a sort-of anti-“Masterpiece Theater” where he would feature supremely awful examples of theater, ballet and other artistic pursuits, concluding each performance with “There, that wasn’t so good now, was it?” 

If they ever had an episode dedicated to watch online, “Bad Softcore Erotica,” “Entangled” is pretty much exactly the kind of film that might have been included. In this achingly pretentious work from writer-director Milena Lurie, Ana Girardot plays Marin, a woman who is still dealing with the psychological repercussions of a recent miscarriage and is upset that her longtime boyfriend (Peter Mark Kendall) seems to want to just get past it and act as if nothing has happened. Over the course of a long weekend, she tries to take stock of her life and what she wants to do, at various points meeting up with an old ex-boyfriend (Gregory Fitoussi) and an intriguing new prospect (Jonathan Cake) that she comes across in a bar.

This free download setup might have developed into something worthwhile if Lurie had bothered to develop Marin into an interesting character who made us sympathize with her as she tried to see her way through her intensely personal trauma. Apparently, that was a little too difficult so instead we are treated to an endless array of scenes in which we see her showering languidly, bathing languidly, posing in lingerie languidly, attending lingerie fashion shoots languidly and bantering with the possible new men in her life in a manner that is not nearly as captivating or seductive as the film clearly believes her to be. All of this is stitched together with a narration comprised of such purple prose that one might think that the entire thing was actually a super-subtle satire of old-school “art” movies until realizing that humor is just one of the rainbow of emotions that it never demonstrates any working knowledge of at any point. Formless, aimless and flimsier than the underwear on constant display, “Entangled” is such a dreadful and pretentious bore that even those with a pronounced interest in female-driven cinema will find it all but the full movie in HD is unendurable.