Movie review: ‘A Love Affair of Sorts’

Publicized as the first feature made entirely with the Flip camera, David Guy Levy’s DIY indie “A Love Affair of Sorts” is exactly what such a technology-specific effort promises: epic navel-gazing and interminably low-stakes visual artistry.

Levy’s debut as a director stars himself (told you so) as a painter with a Flip camera (sigh) who coerces a beautiful Hungarian stranger named Enci (Lili Bordán) he meets in a bookstore to also use a Flip camera (sigh, sigh) so that they can record each other playing getting-to-know-you.

Normally a producer in the indie world, Levy might fancy himself a brave chronicler of the distancing and disaffected (he’s not), but he’s truly no screen presence, seeming bored, smug, thought-free and whiny by turns as he unrealistically draws Bordán’s at least mildly intriguing Enci into a relationship.

Levy’s only real gambit to make his movie a conversation starter is a reality-blurring detour into the making of the making of, a case of micro-meta that comes too little too late after an hour of numbing, character-less exchanges and shakily held shots of the leads angling to be on camera.

Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we’re such an addictively self-documenting modern society.

“A Love Affair of Sorts.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood.