"Ten Tiny Love Stories" (2001) - Movie Review

Rodrigo Garcia’s “Ten Tiny Love Stories” has ten women telling not so much about their love but something like it. Each give attention to detail to the men they spent the night with, held their hands and keep repeating how they smelled. Some men stunk but liked them anyway, some were immaturely boyish but sweet. And they are women, being women in their characters. Each monologue does not last the same time and tells more about them than the people they talk about. The people in their stories become the background information. They are the tools, not the content.

Some of them tell their names not as an introduction but as a reply to the people they lived, met and passed on. Garcia does not surprise when he took the “In Treatment” TV series as it is a monologue towards the therapist, though there is a string of events which becomes the series. Here they seem to be doing an anonymous interview but and hence there is truth with the shades of withholding information than telling lies. The altered version and the version they would like to remember are told with vivid nature and would scare the men of the actuality their partners think of. Men might split it wide open but this minutiae of information is not something they will be patient for.

There is Radha Mitchell sharing the story of stumbling into an ex-boyfriend who specifically seem to have visited the town to see her after a sufficiently long time. She tells that the next day morning breakfast invitation will not be attended by her since she admits of spending a night with a guy she has been dating. But she is pulled back to the man she once loved and goes through a specific night. Similarly comes the next narration from Alicia Witt wondering the guy she wants to be with pulling back the memories completely disconnected.

All of them take single shot and lets the audience in for that minutes of their life they lived. We take this reality confession in a certain manner of judgment ourselves and amused on how these women play games to gain control and most of the time end being in a place they do not really like to be. Such is Lisa Gay Hamilton’s character been played well by this Argentinean guy and a date which she says heading nowhere begins to take another route. It is perplexing psychology that how she did not like it but anyway did it and put her in a position in a state of self humiliation and turn into an emotional confession.

Some of them blurt out the truth and some clearly show refrains of the details. The vignettes which begin to give women who we do not really like and then we are dozed off at certain revelation we do not really show interest in. Those are the ones we would not like to go on a date with. They would have mouthful of concealment gushing out in an interview like this.

The perspective is clear which is to look through the other side of the world away from men. It is not about the trophy of winning the sex but how insignificant the physiological importance generally is looked upon. The things which did not matter suddenly multiplying in building pyramids of frustration and then the mere sight of their partners disgusts and nauseates them. The sensation would soon become mutual and the end is ugly but the disappointment is haunting as such.
And it is not love stories because most of them deviate from where they start. That is an interesting approach as it is the procedure of a confiding conversation. We are wondered to whom they are delivering these. True that it is the audience but who really was there a friend or a psychologist? What is the relation between them to get such a open analysis of the sudden men, the long lasting men, the casual men and the disappointing men?

“Ten Tiny Love Stories” is as Garcia’s “Nine Lives” is an experimental approach and it keeps interested in these women till it gets sour. It gets a little unsettling to see the other side a little too candid and wondering the fundamental laws being altered about the trust. If the film completely does not work on me, it is because I did not like the characters than the film. May be a little too much of a detail in this is not something we men want to know. Ignorance is freaking bliss in this regard.