The first person we meet is a Jersey City Italian-American woman in her forties who is up-front about her purposes. She makes $2000 a month, but her expenses come to $3000. So she is not interested in romance, but in balancing her checkbook. She tells one man that he will have to pay her $100 for their date, even if there is no sex involved. The money is supposed to pay just for her time and trouble. She is totally without illusions. She says that she can get "dick" whenever she wants. Men find her sexy, even though she is starting to worry about some bulges appearing around her midsection. "Where did that come from," she tells the camera as she eyes herself in the mirror in a skimpy bra and panties, while grabbing a fold of her flesh in her fingers. "I woke up one morning and it was just there." She is proud of her ability to attract men, but has no use for men who can't deliver some cash. Younger men have been following her around lately because they want to learn about sex and love from an older and wiser woman. She blows them off because there is nothing in it for her. If they want an education, let them pay her tuition.

We then meet another Italian-American, a 40 year old man who lives in a very traditional ethnic neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs where it is considered abnormal to be a "bachelor." He spits the word out and tells us how much he hates it. He is cursed to be a mere 5'4" tall and rails against all the baby-boomer women who demand that their men be taller than them. He describes the agony he has to go through when he has to confess his height to a woman while setting up their first date. He is an only child and visits to his parents in Florida have become hellish as they broach the subject of his bachelorhood and their need for grandchildren one more time. He resolves to visit them only at Christmas time in the future. While in a neighborhood deli, he overhears an old woman referring to him in Italian as a "fag" because he is unmarried. Knowing Italian, he is offended and considers defending himself. He changes his mind at the last minute because it is not socially acceptable to yell profanities at an 80 year old woman. As a last resort, he goes to a dating counselor. He looks into the camera and wonders why he is spending his hard-earned money on learning about life. You shouldn't have to pay for that, he complains.

The next character we meet is a 28 year old woman who has moved to NYC from the Midwest. She is 220 pounds and states that fact openly in her ads. She is a professional woman with conventional attitudes who seems fairly oblivious about her appearance. If anything, she is overly critical about the appearance of her dates. One man was balding and at least 225 pounds, she huffs. Like most Manhattanites, she considers a mate to be part of making it. It is a sign of success. Her big fear is that she only has two years to go until she is thirty, when her chances will be over. Notwithstanding her weight, she has a rather active social life constructed through the personal ads. Her last affair was with a cab-driver who was into S&M. She laughs about their first sexual experience. She brought him back to her apartment, where he opened an overnight case filled with whips, handcuffs, leather masks and a French maid's uniform. After agreeing to be the dominant one, she discovers that she sort of enjoyed the sex although it wasn't exactly her cup of tea. She is crushed after he leaves her. "Can you imagine being dumped by a submissive," she tells the camera.

The final character is a man in his fifties. He is a classic case of arrested development. His attitudes toward women haven't changed since the 1960s and 70s when he only went out with beautiful women, like belly dancers and Playboy waitresses. He shows photos of himself and some of these women. He is dressed in clothing straight out of "Saturday Night Fever." He doesn't seem to realize that life has moved on and that he has gotten older. He escorts the camera crew through his apartment which is furnished in a garishly "erotic" manner with dim lighting and nude sculptures. "My apartment spells sex. If a woman doesn't like the looks of it, she can take off." The only problem is that he doesn't seem to realize that he, like the furnishings, has a dated and seedy quality. Sometimes the brute realities sink in on him, such as the time he is charged for a senior citizen's admission at a movie theater. "Can you imagine that? She thought I was 65?" Anybody looking at his weathered appearance will of course understand the ticket seller's mistake. The only thing that makes this character at all sympathetic is that he describes his personal ads hell with a masochistic relish. He describes taking a woman out to a fancy restaurant on their initial date where the bill came to $190. She was a judge and spent the entire dinner telling him why she wouldn't see him again. She moved in elite social circles and he wouldn't be appropriate for her. What would you expect from a judge, he comments bitterly.

I answered a personal ad myself once. The woman who had placed it was Kerri Jacobs, a high-profile journalist who wrote for Metropolitan magazine on architecture. She has moved on to New York Magazine, where she is a regular columnist on the same topic. New York Magazine is one of the prime locations for personal ads, especially for conventional New Yorkers. She had placed her ad in the New York Review of Books, a locale for the more intellectually pretentious. Since she was an extremely good-looking young woman, I couldn't exactly figure out why she had placed an ad. After a few moments, I figured it out completely. Nobody was good enough for her. The ads were supposed to help weed out "losers," as she put it. I didn't even want to find out if I was a winner and never called her back.

What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is riding on your initial appearance. Not only do you have to look right, you also have to find the words that the interviewer wants to hear. I had to put up with this nonsense when I worked on Wall Street. Why would I or any sensitive person have to put up with it in affairs of the heart? One of the reasons that Columbia University was such a deliverance for me was that I would no longer have to put up with the stupid questions of people in the Personnel Office. "Why do you think Paine-Webber and you are suitable for each other?" "I don't know. The thought of working at another one of these Wall Street dumps makes me sick to my stomach. I just need the money to pay for my rent, scholarly Marxist books and African music CD's."

The unstated, and therefore more powerful, message of this movie is that the cash nexus distorts everything. Everything in capitalist society, including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their exchange value. This colors everything. The way we speak reflects this alienated existence. We speak of the "investment" we have in an intimate relationship. We are worried whether our "assets" are to be found in our appearance, like Richard Gere's, or in our intelligence or wit, like Woody Allen's (well, from 25 years ago anyhow).

Director Nicholas Barker, who hails from England, allows the stories of the four subjects to speak for themselves, but the points they all make cry out for a different way of human beings relating to each other. There are some very effective cinematic means he uses to enhance this theme. In an early scene in the film, we see an Edward Hopper poster on somebody's living-room wall. Hopper is the poet laureate of urban loneliness. His figures are always depicted in isolation from one another. Barker cuts between this Hopper poster and shots of real New Yorkers sitting at luncheon counters or staring out their windows. New York never looked more Hopper-esque than it does in this film.

The film score is also very effective. He alternates between Charlie Mingus big band sounds, which usually accompany one of his characters on their way in a taxi cab to a date, and minimalist electronic music when they sit home alone after the disappointing evening.