Director Julie Moggan connects lovingly with her on-screen subjects in Guilty Pleasures, though, the very device she employs to bind their lives – the roles they play as readers/writers/cover models of pulp romantic fiction – remains oddly disconnected from their journeys. The reality-vs.-fantasy approach Moggan employs never really sticks, but audiences may nevertheless become thoroughly enamoured with her cast of sweet, occasionally eccentric, sometimes sad, everyday people.
Moggan once again adopts the multi-character approach that won her festival acclaim in 2005 with her documentary As the Sun Begins to Set, an intimate look at the myriad of types who cruise the world aboard the QE2 liner. These films are essentially half a dozen shorts interspliced, each featuring self-contained arcs that ultimately meet at uplifting conclusions. Her characters share a passion, be it outdated seagoing adventures or Mills & Boon melodrama, which defines a key characteristic of their being. Moggan uses her protagonist’s obsession as the first step on what she intends to be a more profound journey.
The vastness of the backdrop Moggan employs services the notion that her themes are universal. In Guilty Pleasures, her protagonists are Roger, a pensioner with 50 titles to his name penned under the pseudonym 'Gill Sanderson’; Japanese housewife Hiroko, who pines for David Beckham and ballroom dances like the heroes of her favourite books but settles for a mild-mannered husband who offers his own rewards; Indian divorcee Shumita, convinced her philandering ex still may be 'the one’; working-class Brit Shirley, defining her own romantic life despite sharing life with a conflicted, bi-polar partner; and, Steven, a New York-based bachelor who obsesses over self-growth and his single life between assignments as a bare-chested Harlequin cover stud.
Moggan’s self-filmed footage is expertly cut by editor Claire Ferguson (The End of the Line, 2009), providing seamless transitions from continent-to-continent, character-to-character. And yet the film doesn’t convince in its presentation of kindred souls. Audiences may feel jarringly drawn back into the director’s vision by perfunctory shots of Mills & Boon paperbacks piled high on the streets of a bustling Indian metropolis, or a hollow sequence featuring Roger overseeing a gathering of fans and wannabe novelists. Moggan awkwardly alternates between celebrating maleness (Shirley’s troubled man goes OTT one Valentine’s Day), thoroughly mocking it (Shumita’s boorish Lothario) and nastily turning against it (hunky Steven, confident and comfortable in his own admittedly shallow world, becomes the butt of the filmmaker’s jokes when he finally finds a partner).
Ultimately, one is left wondering exactly what the director was trying to convey. Moggan deftly handles the often lumpy-throat realities of her subjects, but her intentions are never entirely convincing . Did they all achieve their own romantic fantasies? Should we celebrate their compromised dreams? There is glory in the simple triumphs of their lives, but I am still unsure what that has to do with the multi-million dollar industry of manufactured romantic fiction.
