“I'll stop as soon as I fall in love”

In 2006 Karyn Bosnak, she of Save Karyn fame, followed her autobiographical cash-grab with some contemporary romance fiction, a novel entitled Twenty Times a Lady. This tells the story of Delilah Darling, a recently-unemployed, twenty-nine year-old singleton who drunkenly sleeps with her former boss and hits the dizzy heights of twenty sexual partners, almost two times the national average, still with no immediate prospect of a husband. Instead of adding to her number then, and on the advice of self-help books and a priest, she decides to seek out her ex-boyfriends to find if any of them are now suitable marriage material, learn a little something about herself, and maybe, just maybe, find love along the way. With the help of her dog, Eva Gabor, and the sexy-bartender-next-door, she heads off across the United States on a madcap adventure sure to delight those who are entertained by that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, and completely coincidentally, in 2008 the bright sparks at the US television network CBS created a show concerning an attractive female who visits a psychic and discovers that she has already dated the love of her life. The Ex-List, as it happens, was based on the 2007 Israeli series The Mythological X, to convolute this anecdote to the point of tedium. Anyway, the aptly named Bella Bloom sets off in search of her myriad of ex-boyfriends, convinced there she will find the husband to grow old with and one morning way off in the future find lifeless next to her in bed. Each week she would track down another former beau, assisted ably by a handsome bachelor, her next door neighbour and best friend. Almost immediately it became obvious where the show was headed, and sure enough it was cancelled after four episodes.

Never ones to let an obviously flawed idea die gracefully, however, Hollywood responded with a glossy adaptation of Twenty Times a Lady, entitled What's Your Number?, hoping a few artificial changes would tempt the thrice-bitten audience into theatres. Now then, novel and silly TV series, modern women do not take romantic advice from mediums or the New York Post, they receive their dating insights from lifestyle magazines, and so, when an attractive female singleton reads Marie Claire she realises American women average ten and a half sexual partners in their lifetime, with seventy-two per cent of the same ladies confused over what constitutes half a sexual partner. For Anna Faris’ renamed Ally Darling, her number has already hit the dizzy heights of nineteen, and then a further statistic is bandied about. Once women reach an even score they are somehow doomed to never marry and experience the bittersweet joy of waking one morning to find their husband's corpse snuggled gently beside them. Dun-dun-dun.

When Ally celebrates her life-changing decision to swear off all men until the perfect one comes along, she has a few too many cocktails and achieves her partner-limit through a shameful one night stand with Community. Oh no, Anna Faris, you have already reached your maximum number at the early age of Anna Faris' acting age-range. Therefore, Ally concludes, she must delve back into her history, and find her husband from the assorted back-story of doomed relationships and casual sexual encounters, because this is enough of an idea for a romantic comedy nowadays. Fortunately for Miss Darling, and the creaky plotting, her hunky, single, possibly charming, next door neighbour agrees to help track down the men and then watch those awkward conversations, all the while making snide, possibly charming, asides to the amusement of no one but himself.

What follows is predictable and largely embarrassing for all concerned, as lovably clumsy Anna Faris and the possibly charming torso with head Chris Evans slowly fall in love through arguments, occasionally interrupted by a previously-respected comedian slumming it for money. What’s Your Number? hints at the wider implications of its concept without ever concluding with anything worth knowing. Audiences may enjoy a handful of the jokes and will no doubt cheer as the girl rejects the pleasant businessman for the misogynistic, unemployed slacker, but they will garner no comfort from the knowledge that every facet of your life will work out ideally if you are the protagonist in a romantic comedy. After all, how do Ally and Colin afford such luxurious apartments when neither have jobs and why are they able to find ever-lasting love when neither one of them has any likeable personality traits?

The film, scripted by writers inclined towards sitcoms and shot by a director inclined towards television, lacks the cinematic depth most modern cinema lacks in whatever era we are calling this one. Despite an indecent unwillingness to engage the viewer in anything besides contempt, What’s Your Number? accidentally treads upon a handful of curious insights before abandoning everything for gynecology jokes and the womanly delight of weddings. The filmmakers understood who made up their target audience and that crowd did not include we Bewildered Hearts, with questions and concerns and a desire for romantic comedies to either entertain or challenge human assumptions of living.

Towards the beginning of the film, as Ally leaves a bar, disgusted to discover one ex-boyfriend remains a bartender, with Colin, the out-of-work musician (although a bartender and unemployed actor in the novel) she concludes the film determined to love forever, she shouts him down over the male’s idealised fantasy of the perfect woman, mother-sister-lover-friend-angel-devil-earth-home. Ally describes her less eloquently, but resolutely insists such a lady does not exist, and Colin is quick to agree. This argument is largely irrelevant, as the movie continues towards a different epiphany that woman are not defined through the eyes of their lovers, or through friends, family or rivals, but by themselves. The scientists at Marie Claire, uptight married friends, possibly charming neighbours and Martin Freeman cannot force Ally to become someone she should not have to become. Through what amounts to an arbitrarily-sketched character arc our heroine comes to the same conclusion, only to learn one drunken night stand never happened, so Colin is her twentieth after all and her whole journey of self-doubt and recrimination was meaningless.

It would be very easy, and probably correct, to dismiss What’s Your Number? as shameful sexism, yet the pressures on modern women come from within. Ally’s two romantic options differ crucially in their reaction to hearing her number, but neither particularly care about who she was, rather who she is, even though who she is never gets explained by the narrative. No one passes moral judgement on Colin’s abundant sexual history or his appalling treatment of women, until Ally, who dismisses him as a pig before sleeping with him. Colin’s attraction to Ally is purely physical, and his developing social interest grows from their proximity, her seeing his lifestyle means it is impossible for him to lie to her. They aren’t so much soul-mates as flatmates, wise to each other’s distortions.

The audience will learn nothing from the film, or Ally’s revelation, because it is shallow, obvious and played for laughs. Mostly, however, What’s Your Number? has no resemblance to the real world and the statistics have been conjured from thin air to benefit the story. An admittedly ten-year-old study stated U.S. women average about four partners, making Ally’s achievement all the more impressive and further burdening her with a moronic social stigma she does not seem too concerned about, until a friend elaborates. ‘In America, 96% of women who have been with 20 or more lovers can’t find a husband,’ she says over drinks in a bar, pulling numbers from the recesses of nowhere. How can anyone relate to anything that isn’t remotely accurate? When you cannot empathise with the characters continued viewing is usually unwarranted, and when the film, book, article uses made-up findings to prove its point a critical evaluation of those results would be obviously misguided.