Dating The Enemy

Dating The Enemy is  romantic comedy of the kind that Hollywood churns out in its desperate pursuit of the under-30 demographic.  The supposedly cute battle-of-the-sexes premise has cute science journalist, Tash (Claudia Karvan), and cute MTV host, Brett (Guy Pearce), switch bodies Freaky Friday-style in order to find eventually, of course, true love in each others' arms. Whether the film is worth watching depends entirely on whether one agrees that either actor is cute.

Karvan is of course Australia's most watchable female star, combining an engaging down-to-earth directness with an irresistibly photogenic face. Guy Pearce on the other hand, questions of integrity aside, seems to have inherited some kind of canine jaw structure and whilst Brad Pitt-looking from some angle looks almost deformed from others, particularly when in left profile. Still, that is often the case with the kind of male model type he is playing here so we can let that go and evidently a significant female audience find him as attractive as he is supposed to be to the women in the film.

Eye-candy alone, however, does not a movie make and this one is not well enough written (by the director) or acted to sustain attention for anyone whose worldview is not derived from Who Weekly or E! News. Although both actors largely portray trans-generic role behaviour, acknowledging that they both have difficult tasks, Karvan makes a better fist of her supposed gender switch than Pearce (who largely draws on his turn as a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, 1994) but the essential problem is that the script does not develop the pre-switch characters sufficiently to give meaning to their transmogrification (Karvan's eyelid fluttering initial appearance is ludicrously girlish for a grown woman, let alone someone who is supposed to be a science nerd and career journo). Appropriately enough, the film continues to regularly appear on television where it fills in the vacant slots between soap commercials.

 

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