Frequent bursts of humour and some interesting characters mark out documentary LOVE & ENGINEERING as an entertaining zip through the dating lives of several engineers based in Finland. However, the superficiality of the quest, indulgence of societal cliché and lack of connective tissue leaves the film’s purpose and message feeling more than slightly empty.

The film centres around the attempts of Atanas Boev, a Bulgarian engineer based in Finland, to help his fellow geeks land a lady (Atanas himself is now married with a kid). There is a lot of talk about ‘hacking’ women and decoding their desires down a basic algorithmic level. A lot of this is presented as a simple playing of the game, so to speak, and Atanas himself seems more genuine than this would imply.

However, as the film progresses, small detail piles upon little remark to add up to an irritating portrait – which the film itself makes little play to understand or challenge. There is no sense of irony when Atanas declares there is a multimillion-dollar industry based around allowing women to “hack” men, implying he and his merry gang of geeks are simply trying to level the playing field.

Much is made of the scientific approach being taken to ‘love’, but the scientific method is notable by its absence.

Much is made of the scientific approach being taken to ‘love’, but the scientific method is notable by its absence. There is little scientific inquiry at work. University professors drift in and out of the gang’s musings, but this is not an attempt to take the natural curiosity of the engineer and apply it to the search for love.

“This is science” comes the declaration – but it doesn’t look familiar to any psychologist or scientist. This is more a portrait of the sort of person exemplified by Jesse Eisenberg’s opening scene in THE SOCIAL NETWORK: “[You’re] going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd[…] It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Much of the human content merely amounts to elongated why-don’t-girls-like-us whining.

The clichéd self-pitying would be fine if the film was presenting this as-is and elucidating something about the mindset of the group. However, it doesn’t and there are plenty of attempts to generate sympathy for the quest of the men whose fundamental line of enquiry is flawed and even disconcerting (that women are creatures to be enticed and lured through subterfuge and clinical analysis and not, you know…people).

…lack of connection between the emotions at play and the film itself leaves it hanging.

The glimpse of humanity comes in the form of Todor, one of the engineers, suffering a mild rejection. It’s genuinely quite moving, an obviously upset man and a familiar feeling to many people. It is the film’s first ounce of genuine emotion, augmented by the shot choices made by Tonislav Hristov. However, interspersing both botched and successful pick-up ventures with shots of Second Life DJing is intensely dull, and this lack of connection between the emotions at play and the film itself leaves it hanging.

As a documentary, it is fundamentally unclear what it is director Tonislav Hristov is documenting. The subjects are – in an admittedly occasionally amusing way – hard to find sympathy with. The film does little to illuminate their mindset, the error of the pursuit’s premise or display much of a purpose or message in its construction. Whilst mildly amusing, in failing to try and shed light upon the deeper elements of either love or engineering, a slight disservice is done to both.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB8Cpuh1W14