Tainted love
Cherish riffs off the romance genre.

By Susan Gerhard

A CENTRAL CONTRADICTION of boom-era San Francisco didn't go unnoticed by Mission-nurtured director Finn Taylor: what the odd cinder-block housing unit whose proliferation we all fought so hard over, the resting spot of choice for the up-and-dot-comer, the architectural abomination known as the "loft," most resembles is ... a prison. Taylor sets his San Francisco drama deep inside some – his could-be yupster Zoe (Robin Tunney) first lives in an actual loft, then moves abruptly to a prison space that has an eerie similarity to her previously tricked-out unit. In both locations the furniture has that plasticized scent of Ikea; it looks so drab it might as well have been state issued. Her character doesn't like to be alone, yet life keeps handing her situations where solitude is the requirement – first because she has no boyfriend with whom to share her opulence, then because she has no freedom to leave.

She's an off-kilter animator who runs her life with clueless abandon: annoying her coworkers by using headphones at work to listen to greatest hits of yesteryear, dressing in the '80s' best castoff clothes, meeting men and losing them at the speed of light. She quickly moves from being a prisoner of her own habits to just being a prisoner, however, after a night of drinking and flirting. Her car is hijacked, and the hijacker hides under the dash while forcing her at gunpoint to mow down a bicycle cop. While she waits for a trial that has no chance of being fair – her lawyer won't even believe her story – she's put on the state's "bracelet" program, which allows her to remain inside her own designer cell outside a real prison as long as she wears an electronic ankle bracelet that tracks her location. When the prison's bracelet-program coordinator (Tim Blake Nelson) comes by to adjust the shackles on his kooky indoor-roller skating, love song-obsessed charge, a whole new plotline ensues.

Cherish is the second indie movie Taylor (formerly literary director for Intersection for the Arts) has put out with producer Johnny Wow (Concrete Pictures), and the collaborators' M.O. is starting to take shape. Pick out a worn genre (the road movie-buddy movie in Dream with the Fishes, the romance genre here), throw in the monkey wrench early, and watch the audience jump to the front of their seats as they fully enter an all-new bandwidth. Both films build unique and seamless universes, both time that major plot twist/genre realignment to explode within the first minutes of the film, and both follow one bizarre character through humorous yet emotional tortures to a transcendent end. Taylor likes to work in mind states, and if Dream with the Fishes went the drugs-and-pop philosophical route, Cherish gets stuck in the liminal zone of A.M. radio.

Like so many soundtrack supermovies that have come before it, from The Big Chill (as in "Heard It Through the Grapevine" one too many times by now) to Muriel's Wedding (to blame for the ABBA revival), Cherish capitalizes on a newly rediscovered musical niche and squeezes every last bit of life from it. This latest choice of music might not make for great mileage on the CD player – the novelty of these '70s and '80s love tunes is that they're already played out – but it does a great job of comically antagonizing the romance genre out of sickly sweet torpor. Taylor and his characters totally appreciate the dark side of these songs: 10cc floats out "I'm Not in Love" as office playa Andrew (Jason Priestley) offers a "Hey, beautiful" to wide-eyed Zoe, then follows up with a "Hey, gorgeous" to the next cubicle-sitter, with besotted Zoe still lost in reverie. Still, the idea of replaying the most replayed songs on the A.M./office white-noise circuit is better in theory than in practice: how many more times could you stand to hear Hall and Oates's "Private Eyes" before you would need to leave the movie theater and scrape the skin off your own body?

Flat at times, Cherish's comedy goes down better than its thrills, mostly because of a cast that includes unheralded geniuses like Nelson, who carries off his nervous warden character with clammy charm. The film's greatest casting coup was slotting in Liz Phair as the icy office ogre who's glad to see coworker Zoe behind bars. It's a battle of the '90s radio-dial superstars, indie rockers versus easy listeners.

As with Dream with the Fishes, Taylor films San Francisco with an eye for cliché avoidance when the film eventually does get its jailbreak: instead of the typical Golden Gate Bridge and Lombard Street shots, Taylor follows his characters on a chase up and down less famous hills and through less trammeled alleyways. His indoor spaces are designed down to their fibers, and though the overall lensing lacks the sensitive eye of the supersaturated and evocative Dream with the Fishes, the loud color schemes and bright spaces match that film's scary, cheery mood. Unrelenting in creating that mood, the film's bawdy soundtrack leaves no room for rest. From Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" to the film's title song, "Cherish," it builds sentimentality, humor, and nausea – a kind of pleasant disease state – into its anxious 99 minutes. Bring your own bucket; you might even enjoy the idea that you'll need it.

'Cherish' opens Fri/7 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.