Review: The California No lays bare the casual emotional cruelty of L.A.

The correct way of shooting LA might best be described as giving the city enough celluloid with which to hang itself. The camera need only blankly observe the environment and let LA do the rest, its numb vagaries and sun-bleached, narcotized personality soon becoming clear.

Writer-director Ned Ehrbar gets this in his feature debut, The California No, which skewers the casual disregard of both Hollywood and, increasingly, love.

"I didn't invent the phrase 'the California no,' but I fell in love with it as soon as I heard it," Ehrbar explains, it referring to "the distinctly Angeleno method of rejecting someone by saying nothing at all - by ignoring emails, not returning calls and simply waiting until the other person gets fed up or embarrassed enough to just leave it alone."

Elliot (Noah Segan, Looper) is a jaded journalist who is stunned to find out in the couples' therapy office one day that he is in an open relationship. Moping like only a privileged man with everything going for him can, he tries to deflect from the pain of this discovery by pursuing an agonisingly 'chill' relationship/fuckbuddy-ship with Kaley (Jordan Hinson), a girl he meets in a bar, while trying to get his career back on track with an indulgent long-form profile piece with an A-list actor (Jesse Bradford, Bring It On).

It's the film junket circuit that leads him to pursue the latter, the frothy, 5-minute interviews of which we glimpse in the film's funniest scenes. The stock answers regurgitated by actors ("I just fell in love with the script," "It's like the city itself is a character", "we were like a family on set") were particularly painful to your reviewer who has been the recipient of many himself, but anyone who has seen even just a handful of promotional film interviews will recognise them.

As the story progresses, Elliot finds that shadowing celebrities lives in their mansions is not all it cracked up to be and that dating can be every bit as confusing and disingenuous as a faltering relationship.

An Apatowian look at self-consciousness and how bad we're becoming at just telling each other how we really feel, this is a thoughtful, tender debut from Ehrbar and I look forward to seeing what he does next.