What Love Looks Like is a feature length film made up of five stories with everyone searching for that elusive thing: love. What Love Looks Like is written, directed and produced by Alex Magana and provides a refreshing and alternative look at modern day love, cliches not included!
Given these strange times we are all facing with lockdown, this is the type of film that shows some of the storylines some of us may or may not be experiencing. One couple is a young woman dating a man who doesn’t notice her and is more interested in dating his phone. The next is a tinder ninja who can only connect with women on a superficial level. Another is a widower who eats his packed lunch of sandwiches every day in the same spot, and lastly the youngest of the group a shy young man who wants to ask a girl out but doesn’t know how.
It is hard to make an ensemble film such as this work when told as short interconnecting stories. It’s been tried with Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve both with all star casts and some of the stories were perfectly executed and some felt like fillers. I make the comparison because films such as this rely on very well written scripts as well as writing. In What Love Looks Like, Alex Magana in two of these short stories does an excellent job with allowing the actors space to act and the words to do the work, that is in the case of the widower and what I have euphemistically called the tinder ninja. The others are very funny and are engaging but don’t hit the same high notes.
What Alex Magana does well is to sidestep the melodrama and the tired romantic tropes to look at love differently. He challenges the audience’s expectations and assumptions and manages to provide an engaging and well paced film with a fair number of characters we actually care about and want to spend our time with. He should be commended on a small budget, he’s produced an indie film that will make you laugh and at times nod in agreement.
What Love Looks Like is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Tubi right now.
