Chattanooga Film Festival Coverage
Love and Work review
The director of Jethica is back with another winner.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Love and Work
Directed by Pete Ohs
Written by Stephanie Hunt, Will Madden and Pete Ohs
Starring Stephanie Hunt, Will Madden and Frank Mosley
Love and Work Review
Director Pete Ohs delivered one of last year’s best low budget independent film, Jethica. That was a ghost story that found considerable fun in having its living characters act remarkably unphased by their otherworldly predicament. It goes without saying that I was excited to see his next film, Love and Work, making the festival rounds. It’s completely different than Jethica…but it’s just as entertaining.
Love and Work is set in the past of a different future. It presents a world with one extremely unique quirk. Work is outlawed. Everything that needs to be made has been. There are more than enough products to sustain everyone. There is no longer any point in producing anything else. While it sounds like paradise…it leaves a small sect of people with a profound problem. All they want to do is work.
Love and Work doesn’t get much into the obvious questions that arise from a society where people aren’t allowed to work. Namely…there are such things as essential jobs that have little to nothing to do with the productions of goods. Forget doctors or garbage collectors or public transportation entirely…who is selling the goods we already have a surplus of? This isn’t a macro examination about the effects of a complete labor shut down. It exists to show us a world through the eyes of characters who just really want to cobble shoes together.
Diane (Stephanie Hunt) arrives for a job interview for such a position at the start of Love and Work. After the most cliché job interview you can imagine with the boss, Hank (Frank Mosley), Diane takes her place on the line next to Bob Fox (Will Madden). Their joy (complete with a working song) is short lived. The job is shut down by people wearing crossing guard jackets. They are there to enforce the law. If that sounds like a job…well…it is. The movie explains that there is no payment for it though. So that doesn’t count.
The goal from this point forward is to find new jobs while avoiding a dreaded third strike. Fox has never gotten a strike before. They’re old hat for Diane. She generally racks up two strikes and then moves on to the next town. This is complicated by a growing relationship with Fox. It begs the question, in the most backwards way possible, of how to balance work and relationships. This isn’t as simple as finding time for both. They really want to work. Can a relationship develop when your only priority is having a job?
It should be obvious that Love and Work mines some quirky gold out of the absurdity. With jobs banned…Diane and Fox have to learn of new opportunities through clandestine meetings in the park. Codewords are used to openly discuss that which should never be spoken allowed. Looking for an “umbrella on a rainy day” a tidy stand in for “looking for an interview for a job”. They get a lead, but it is quickly revealed to be a trap. Strike two.
The level of need to work that Diane possesses is such that she takes a job folding boxes in a parking lot at night from Hank…who doesn’t know how to do anything but be a boss. It’s busted up almost as quickly as the last two attempts. Strike three. The story doesn’t end there, of course. In some ways the story is just beginning. Love and Work finds humor in its central concept. It eventually finds something more profound.
Shot in black and white in mostly empty spaces, Love and Work isn’t going to blow you away with its production budget. That’s not to say it isn’t a good-looking picture. It has its own minimalist style that fits the story it’s telling. Its best special effect is the committed performances of its cast. Stephanie Hunt is perfectly cast as Diane. She’s a joy to watch on screen from hopeful shoe assembler to three striker who working through an epiphany.
The world of Love and Work is a simple one that finds joy in its strange concept. It ends up having more to say about it than you initially think. Pete Ohs is establishing himself as a name to watch in the strange independent movie concept department. With another interesting take on things, and Hunt’s work as the film’s lead, Love and Work is another gift. Jethica was something otherworldly treated like an offhand nothing. Love and Work is an idea played completely straight within its strange for exactly one reason world.
Scare Value
Pete Ohs is establishing himself as a master of the off-beat independent comedy. Love and Work doesn’t feel like anything you’ve seen before. It’s a funny film that commits to its strange concept in full. An excellent cast sells everything to perfection. Unique, brilliant, and one of a kind.
