(Written by Allison Brown)
While I didn’t expect The Perfect Find to be my favorite Tribeca film, I did want it to be a solid romantic comedy, and found that in the first thirty minutes. Unfortunately, the rest is tonally all over the place. Director Numa Perrier tries to weave a raunchy comedy, serious relationship drama, and catty career tête-à-tête with a pretentious celebration of black-and-white film and culture. Classics with iconic Black leads are brought up by year unnaturally in dialogue with a supplemental clip; each time it feels like a gratuitous name drop. The script is unnecessarily sexually graphic in a way that adds nothing. It only serves to take away from the intended classy depiction meant to be inferred from Jenna (Gabrielle Union) and Eric’s (Keith Powers) love of classic cinema.
The Perfect Find fails most in its agist point-of-view. Jenna is called “AARP pussy” by Eric’s friends, and he barely defends her. He is confused that she lacks a “70s bush,” and instead gets waxed. Let’s be real here: Gabrielle Union is a beautiful ageless woman. Even on paper, she is barely in her 50s, while Keith Powers is only twenty years her junior at 31. Had I not been previously familiar with both actors, their ages would be indistinguishable. Outlandishly, this gets brought up often, and it was shocking to see this perspective from a female director.
The story tries to fit in way too large of a time span, and as a result, each segment of Jenna’s life feels rushed. At first, I thought it was an interesting choice to use the credits as a sort of prequel to the story we see play out. The execution is visually striking with paper cutouts and tears in the style of a scrapbook. By the dénouement, the choice seems evidently intentional to cut down on the runtime to make it more manageable. We could have easily started with Jenna moving into her new Brooklyn apartment and relaying her troubles to a friend. This would save a good chunk of excessive screen time so the plot points that matter could be expanded. It feels as if Jenna’s short stay with her parents in the opening is solely to have an opportunity to get in a shot of Penn Station. A later highlight of the Brooklyn Bridge feels out of place as well, as if it were thrown in solely to appeal to the Tribeca screeners to be a quintessential New York movie.
I am not quite sure who the target audience is here. Traditional rom-com lovers will be deterred by the overabundance of cinematic history, and film buffs will be irritated by the cheesy love story at the core. The Perfect Find ends up one of the bigger festival misses I have seen from Netflix.
The Perfect Find made its mark on Wednesday, June 14th at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, and drops on Netflix on June 23.
