The Mirror Has Two Faces -- 1996 -- PG-13

Been a slow movie week for me. Oh well.

I've kind of wanted to see this one for a while since this "theme" song "I've Finally Found Someone" played a part in my wedding, and what I found was a film that was not that bad. The premise was fairly unique in that we have a guy who is tired of shallow relationships, so he places a personal ad asking for a woman with a Ph.D and over 35. He noted looks are not important.

So Babs' sister answers the ad, and he checks her out. She is giving this speech in class about how love should be platonic to truly work out and sex kills. He leaves early, satisfied with this and misses that the sex part is good while it lasts. They enter the relationship and we get a lot of tension surrounding the idea that they are in a relationship without any of the physical stuff. Well, this tension comes to a head about the time he leaves for a European conference tour, and we move into the final half hour of the film.

I felt the development of the lead characters was pretty good, and you could really feel the emotion in what was going on. The obstacles here were purely psychological which often makes for an entertaining film in my opinion, since it requires some fairly decently developed characters to pull off. You might say the psychological obstacle was a physical one...ha.

We were not without flaws, however. Since this was a film dealing with the purely psychological matter of love without the physical, the entire film was chatter. Nothing really happened at any point visually. It could have easily been a play. Bridges' performance during the post-wedding scenes was just weird. He smiled almost the entire time. And it wasn't a natural smile; it was this weird, freaky smile of a serial killer waiting for the right time to take out his victim. 

A typical romantic comedy usually has a separation of the lovers followed by the climax where they make up and live happily ever after. This one has a separation, a climax, another separation, and then they come together. It makes sense in the plot, but it threatens to drag out the ending. The same goes for a scene where the loose end of her sister's husband is tied up (I'm not into spoiling these things). That one scene nearly ruined the entire film and her character for me. I'll grant it was a film trick to build tension, but in my opinion that was the wrong kind of tension to build.

So, if you like a romantic film that's a little off the beaten path, more psychological than physical, and doesn't involve another up and coming female star, this one works fairly well. I'll say it's not a complete waste of time.