Desire for Data

In Canada, at a night-time garden party, a group of young adults are busy chatting each other up; Dylan and Molly seem unable to get over their break-up, Carly has Dylan in her sights, Molly is seducing Noel to rouse his ex’s jealousy; as for Michelle, she is speaking to Charlie about their one-night fling… Already interspersed by individual daytime interviews, where each envisages his or her near future, this chronicle of an ordinary party is suddenly analysed, manipulated, tabulated: a group of young French statisticians note the attractions, signs of seduction, and anticipate the probability that couples will form. “The drunker they are, the higher the compatibility”, we hear in this concept-film, which is not bereft of humour. Yet, unobtrusively, it poses the question of free will: accentuated by the banal frontality of the interviews, can the life of these beer-pong-lovers really, and almost tragically, be reduced to mathematical formulae? Happily, these matter-of-fact analysts also seem to be making eyes at one another in a more discreet fashion, and gradually forging complicities that mirror their experiment. For these researchers, sitting amid the amphitheatre’s old woodwork, the “desire for data” doubtless masks the “data of desire” – and eventually they finish by opening a few beers. (Charlotte Garson)