In the back-story of the Canadian indie Confusions of an Unmarried Couple, Lisa (Naomi Johnson) nagged her live-in boyfriend Dan (Brett Butler) until he proposed to her. Shortly after, he came home from work to find her in bed with another woman. He walked out flat and hasn't talk to her for six months.

The action picks up on the day Dan makes an unexpected visit to Lisa, who still lives in the apartment they used to share. Dan has a list of items he wants to retrieve--a Pretty in Pink album, their queen-sized mattress, the engagement ring--but he also wants to give Lisa a chance to apologize, and to vent some of his anger, have sex, get back together, he's not sure what all or in what order.

Both Dan's lists seem equally self-explanatory to him and random to us, and that's the strength of this little movie. Dan brings subjects up but doesn't know what to do when Lisa's response isn't what he anticipated. Within half a breath he may be arguing to get back together and then calling her some variation on "*****-sucking dyke." (Confusions has the honesty of the first half of Chasing Amy without the PC explanations of the second half.)

"Confusion" is the key word here and the movie dramatizes it with the fidelity of a cinéma-vérité farce. Dan has an agenda but he also has an adolescent boy's desire to come out ahead in an argument, to save face, and it scrambles his brains. He can't distinguish between a workable theory and a transparent rationalization. (This is the basis of Butler's most sustained scene, in which Dan explains that it's normal for a guy to cheat on his girlfriend with contrasting types but ****ed up to cheat on her with a girl who looks like her.) Dan keeps his cool--that is, he keeps on talking and doesn't leave when Lisa attempts to show him the door--but the conversations always spiral out of control because he doesn't really know how to express what he feels, and his feelings don't all point in the same direction. All he knows is the outcome he hopes to attain, because of some of his feelings but despite others.

I love comic naturalism about sex, which is one of those areas of life in which "crazy" and "actual" may be indistinguishable. The movie fearlessly reveals Dan's fantasies and fears, and Brett Butler carries the movie because he holds back nothing. He knows what kind of a fool Dan is--as a greasy-haired, beer-drinking hipster with the singsong cadences and mojo of his generation but also as an eternal Male--and he never tries to cover it up out of actorish vanity. Butler carries the movie with his butt-crack hanging out.

By contrast, Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset expect you to admire the couple for their undergraduate pensées and to fall in love with their relationship. Linklater's gambit is a naturalistic handling of fundamentally romantic material, which is not bad in the way of experimentation but perhaps only if you accept the romantic material as inevitable. Despite the intelligence and innovation, Linklater's diptych falls in line with such "classic" Hollywood movies about the mischances of love as Love Affair and The Clock. He's a very smart guy but his merchandise is day-old pastry.

Confusions of an Unmarried Couple, written by Brett Butler and directed with his brother Jason, abandons romance. You don't have to care whether Dan and Lisa get back together; Lisa herself is far from convinced it's a good idea, even at the end as she approaches a whopping orgasm. What we see, in fact, is the interaction of a couple whose incompatibility is so charged with sexual tension that the points of their arguments melt away in the heat they generate by arguing. It's like the central mismatch of The Way We Were but approached with graphic frankness and no narcissism.

Confusions has a story arc, but only enough suspense to sustain it, and no fakery (e.g., no running after a bus or taxi, no boom-box serenade). In other words, where Linklater's naturalism borders on romance, the Butlers' naturalism borders on irony. The Butlers' approach is grungier but much less cheesy, and funnier, too. When Lisa catches Dan, visible only from the eyes up, sneaking out with the mattress, it makes a great slapstick cartoon panel because the raunchy candor of the whole endeavor scrubs the hapless hero of his usual damned innocence. The more you abandon sentimentality and self-regard, the more you can identify with Dan, and laugh even harder. (Dan's insistence that Jack Black is hotter than Brad Pitt, his vain attempt to avoid admitting homosexual feelings, is a classic of male evasion.)

The Butlers present the narrative from a male perspective, of course. I don't mean that pejoratively--what possible alternative is there for male moviemakers? And no one has convinced me that a hetero male perspective--or "gaze," or even objectification, for that matter--is automatically illegitimate. It ought to be especially interesting to women and encouraged when presented as candidly as it is in this movie. (Forewarned is forearmed.)

The male point-of-view does, however, constrain Naomi Johnson's performance. The narrative is about what Dan wants, and Lisa, who is angry with him for abandoning her to stew in her guilt for months, comes off as fiercely combative and yet more narrowly abstract than Dan--the inherently hostile Female. (Johnson is about Butler's height and broad in the saddle--her physically assertive gestures spring from a firmly planted position.) The same can be said of the women in R. Crumb's comics and in Charlie Kaufman's scripts (e.g., Catherine Keener in Being John Malkovich). It's not necessarily a negative quality in a movie (even if you think of it as immature), but in Confusions it probably accounts for some repetitiveness and shrillness in Johnson's performance. (She's much better in the interview sequences in which Lisa isn't just reacting to Dan and her eyes show a wider range of emotions in silvery flashes.)

There's a certain amount of film-school cleverness here that could easily be abandoned. In addition to "normal" action that unfolds as if the camera weren't present, there's an opening in which we see Dan through his brother's video viewfinder as he shoots a document of Dan's reactions to the break-up, voice-overs of Dan and Lisa's thoughts, interpolated interviews with each of them though we don't know with whom, a flash-back, and a fourth-wall-breaking moment when Dan speaks to the camera.

The characters and situation are so good, however, that we don't need the direct address to understand what Dan and Lisa are feeling and why they're getting re-entangled. Confusions might have had more impact if the story were all simply acted out. This is, after all, exactly how people behave when no one is watching. (And the material in the interviews might have been included by the expedient of having other people drop in to talk to Dan and Lisa separately.) The cleverness here makes it seem as if the Butlers didn't entirely trust how good their material was.

And it's very good. Their straightforwardness about the unwholesome but often intense mixture of carnality, inertia, and paranoia in sexual relationships is beyond refreshing. They present it as simply as if no one had ever thought it necessary to airbrush reality in a romantic comedy, as if sugarcoating were chemically impossible.