The Trouble with Romance is a Cinemax skin flick without the skin, one in which narrative nonsense doesn’t just fill in the gaps between simulated sex scenes, but actually comprises the action’s entirety. This is, to put it bluntly, a borderline-catastrophic problem, resulting in material so vapid and aimless, it could only have worked as a parody of the cable channel’s soft-core offerings. Via his quartet of tales, each taking place in a different room of the same hotel, writer/director Gene Rhee strives to examine the ups and dons of amour with a mixture of wry humor and straight drama, a strategy that generally involves establishing a romantic situation and then introducing a leaden twist that leads to an opposite-of-expected conclusion. Surprises, unfortunately, are few and far between, save for the startling number of times a tone-deaf joke lands with a thud, an erotic coupling is flaccidly staged and fails to reveal something about character and theme, or relationship moralizing is delivered with simplistic heavy-handedness.
In a Hyatt Regency whose exterior is drenched in moody nocturnal blues, a supremely attractive blonde couple starts getting busy in the bedroom, though their good times are interrupted by the woman’s sudden hallucinations of a former beau. Retreating to the bathroom, the woman starts chatting with her imaginary ex, while her abandoned lover calls up his friend – who, coincidentally, is the guy the woman is hallucinating about – to ask questions like, “How beautiful does a crazy woman need to be before you wouldn’t want to fuck her?” If this scenario sounds like a dreary actor’s workshop exercise unfit for rolling cameras, then it’s been properly described, and is further degraded by Rhee’s blandly functional camera set-ups, which never get more imaginative than a few shots from directly above a bed. No amount of aesthetic showmanship, however, could likely redeem The Trouble of Romance, since the script (co-written with Sharri Hefner and Mike Su) uses its raft of faux-titillating circumstances – a wife brings another woman into her marital bed; a man pays for sex with a fetching escort – and eventual role-reversals to impart nothing meaningful about the complex nature of love.
Only in possession of life-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates-grade insights, Rhee’s film primarily seeks to charm through self-satisfied, pseudo-clever plotting. A husband rejects a threesome as a means of reigniting his marriage’s spark, only to discover that the ménage à trois is just a ruse designed by his spouse to punish him for cheating. A few doors down, a guy’s insensitivity drives his girlfriend to end their three-year affair on the night he planned to propose, which in turn compels him to get wasted with his pothead friends and defecate (farting and plopping noises included!) on his ex’s photo. Finally, a lonely cynic hires a prostitute for the night and, after contending that true love doesn’t exist, falls hard for the thoughtful working girl. Interconnected by quick shots of these characters passing each other in the hallway, The Trouble with Romance’s graceless narratives dimly argue that fate is quirky, that honesty (to oneself and others) is the best policy, and that passion and bliss are, you know, complicated. Rather than elucidating the real intricacies of creating and maintaining relationships, however, what Rhee instead only proves with his directorial debut is the ostensible easiness, despite a crowded theatrical marketplace, of getting one-note drivel produced and distributed.