e-love

>> Gordon Eriksen explores intimacy on the Web in The Love Machine

by MATTHEW HAYS

Filmmaker Gordon Eriksen is understandably wary of the comparisons his latest film, The Love Machine, is evoking. After a well-hyped tour of the festival circuit last year, one critic was prompted to say of the quasi-documentary, "this masterpiece could dethrone Blair Witch in the millennial mind-fuck category."

It's enough to make any filmmaker a bit queasy. "Yeah, I am a bit uneasy with the comparisons. Really, there's not actually a lot that the two films have in common." Besides, of course, the is-it-real-or-is-it-faked conceptual question hanging over both films.

As it turns out, the idea for The Love Machine did come from the newspaper headlines. Eriksen reports that a 1996 story about a scandal at the University of Minnesota caught his eye. A student had set up a Web site which allowed people to post their numbers and invite people to call to have phone sex (thus avoiding the costly phone sex lines). The university eventually caught on, as the student had posted it on the institution of higher learning's server, which eventually collapsed due to the frequency of phone calls.

That, coupled with his long-time interest in computers and technology, prompted Eriksen to embark on The Love Machine, a film about private lives laid out on a sexy Web site. The film has several people brought together by a filmmaker who has learned all the private details of their posted fantasy lives without their knowledge. The filmmaker then invites the group to a dinner party, none of them aware of why they've been gathered in one spot. The film's subplots are varied: one man is a semicloseted Japanese immigrant; another is a woman who wants to approach a woman about having a threesome with her boyfriend.

As the film progresses, these depraved types grow more and more sympathetic as the filmmaker character, Becca, becomes increasingly invasive in her various lines of questioning. "I don't really like the term mockumentary," says Eriksen. "It implies that the audience is being elbowed from the beginning. People really do believe that what they're watching here is real. At every festival screening, it never failed; there were a handful of people at the end of the movie who were ready to chastise the woman director of the film for her behaviour."

What with the rapid evolution of the Internet and our attitudes towards it, was Eriksen worried about his movie seeming dated upon its arrival in cinemas? "If I were to make the film today, I certainly would have been more sarcastic about how corporate interests have smothered the Net. But I know the film will be sold for the sexy element. And hey, work that kink thing if it sells." :

The Love Machine opens Friday, February 18 at the Cinema du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes