SXSW REVIEW: ‘Surrogate Valentine’

A friend told me recently that his main problem with indie romantic comedies is the seemingly built-in syrupy posturing and overly-clever dialogue standing in for actual character development or interesting plot. “Just looking at the poster, I can hear the plink-plink of an acoustic guitar in the soundtrack,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant.

And yet, I never worried if “Surrogate Valentine” would be anything less than clever, engaging, and absolutely satisfying – even in the face of the main character actually being an indie folk musician who plays acoustic guitar.

The credit for that confidence goes straight to director Dave Boyle, whose previous film “White on Rice” garnered such adoration from viewers that the bar was set especially high for this next film. Luckily, Boyle sticks to what he seems to know best: left-of-center, slightly awkward characters, trying to navigate their relationships and find their place in a confusing world.

At the center of “Surrogate Valentine,” in his first film role, is singer / songwriter Goh Nakamura, playing an alternate-reality version of himself. heading out on the road for another location gig in Seattle. But this trip has a twist: a movie based on his life experiences is in production, and his agent has paired him up with a quasi-popular television actor (Chadd Stoops, in a spot-on but cringe-inducing role of thespian blowhard) for a ridealong to learn what “life on the road” is like for a musician aspiring to fame.

Goh hates the idea of this trip, seeing his passenger as a nuisance who’s likely to ruin his “game” – which, we all quickly learn, is running pretty low to begin with. And with the re-introduction of Goh’s old high-school love interest (the lovely, always luminous Lynn Chen), the triangle of longing is complete.

Making allusions to odd couple / buddy picture / road trip movies wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to describe what happens next, but you’d miss the point. “Surrogate Valentine” is a love story at heart; a feature that bases its movement on dialogue more than action.

It would have been easy to let the story slide into angsty melodrama, allowing the dialogue to be more clever than it should have been. Or go the other way, attempting a mumblecore aesthetic with broader appeal. “Surrogate Valentine” does neither. It is just what it means to be: a story about people, told simply, with straightforward language and characterization, ending with a moment which will delight some and infuriate others. For me, there hasn’t been an indie film ending this good since “Sex, Lies And Videotape.”

With a trio of honest, grounded performers, a solid story, and lilting soundtrack with accompanying songs from Nakamura himself, “Surrogate Valentine” hits all the right notes. Avoiding the pitfalls of past and present low-budget indie cinema, this film simply gets it right.