On Tuesday, the Curzon Soho cinema held a speed-dating event in combination with a screening of Shame, a film - so one hears - in which sex is depicted exclusively in a context of anomie, humiliation and self-loathing. (Does sex happen in any other context? you ask. Or I ask, anyway.) Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, describes the film's idea of a date as "an uncomfortably real transcription of a supposedly romantic evening: another long, static camera shot. It starts with stilted conversation, ends with a spark, but is followed by a catastrophic tryst in which there is nothing but emotional degradation."
The reason I know about the Curzon event is that a friend of mine was invited along to it; she made her excuses - she'd already seen it - and left.
I suppose there are worse date movies: inordinately long films, films about the Shoah (Claud Lanzmann's Shoah itself, all nine-and-a-half hours of it, may be the greatest bad-date movie), and films involving sexual violence or perversion (Irréversible, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers). It's interesting to note that Hollywood has already come up with some suggestions: in Annie Hall Woody Allen tries to drag Diane Keaton to Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity; and there's the best bad date-movie scene of all. It leaves me feeling I need to scrub myself down with Milton: