A neophyte director's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's an indie for?

Taken from an off-Broadway play so experimental that one of the romantic leads was originally cast as a midget, Just A Kiss is an attempt by veteran nebbish character actor Fisher Stevens to flex his artistic muscles behind the camera.

Unfortunately, he's so stoked to make an important film about human infidelity and happenstance that he tosses a kitchen sink onto a story already overladen with plot conceits.

Said sink is Rotomation, the love-it-or-hate-it cartoony effect used in Waking Life that is used sparingly here to give a transcendent effect to people's action. It's a visual sign that the characters are doing something significant that will adversely affect them later (an effect often rendered redundant by overly expositional dialogue like, "This is going to be one of those terrible mistakes you can't take back").

The pre-existing conceit is that this is a tale of ... well, I count five overlapping, and mainly destructive, couplings among typical, well-heeled young New Yorkers (as seen on NBC sitcoms of the 1990s -- if Taye Diggs weren't along as a lone black face, this would be a dark, very special episode of The Single Guy). The story jumps artily and unpredictably in time to show you where the events theoretically mesh.

Dag (pronounced "Dog" -- and don't think that joke doesn't get beaten like a cur), played by Ron Eldard, is a commercial director who lives with Halley (Kyra Sedgwick) but has an affair with neurotic and suicidal ballet diva Rebecca (Marley Shelton).

Rebecca is the love of Dag's best friend, Peter. Peter (Peter Breen, who also wrote this) is a working actor who is, in turn "loved" by an insane bowling alley waitress/dominatrix (Marisa Tomei). Halley, meanwhile, finds out about Dag and Rebecca and moves into a friend's apartment where she takes up with a brooding cellist (Diggs).

Peter, meanwhile, ends up on a doomed jet where sparks fly with an unstable femme fatale (Sarita Choudhury), who turns out to be married to Diggs' character and also had a one-night stand with Dag.

Got all that? Good, because Just A Kiss asks you to memorize all this randomness without a program. And if you think there's any sort of character development to be found after all this has been squeezed into 89 minutes, you might believe that Dag and Halley actually belong together.

Apart from the messages that you shouldn't screw around and that fate works in mysterious ways, there's a fairly strong misogynist message in the film -- three of the four main female characters are either suicidal or dangerously psychotic.

Or this could just be an accurate snapshot of the dating scene in Manhattan.

(This film is rated AA)

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