Eden's Curve

NR (mature themes, language, sexual situations, nudity); Street: Sept. 7; Cast: Trevor Lissauer, Sam Levine, Amber Taylor, Bryan Carroll, Julio Perillán; Director: Anne Misawa

WATER BEARER

In the fall of 1972, Peter (Levine) enters a conservative Virginia university. He joins a fraternity and gets involved in a series of complex intimate relationships with men and women that make him question the nature of friendship, love and sexuality. Although Eden's Curve is an entertaining soap opera that taps into just how fast-paced and complicated the first year of college can be, it moves a bit too fast for its dramatic elements to have full impact. Within the first 20 minutes, Peter has not only found himself in the middle of a three-way relationship with his roommate Joe (Lissauer) and Joe's girlfriend (Taylor) but has become the object of desire for one of his other frat buddies (Carroll). By the time Peter retreats to stay with his poetry professor, one begins to wonder if the film would have made a better farce than straightforward drama as the plot elements are too many and the characters are too underdeveloped to make reasonably motivated choices. On the plus side, the film sports a charismatic lead in Levine and an attractive cast of faces familiar to those who scan the independent landscape. --Mekado Murphy