I’ve seen five films in three days at the Los Angeles Film Festival, and every single one is, at least partially, about the break-up of a romantic relationship. Three of these films are in the Narrative Competition: Harmony & Me, Hollywood, je t’aime, and Wah Do Dem. It would be an interesting exercise to try to make the argument that this trend is a sign of the times, that (of course!) filmmakers are using the universal touchstone of romantic trauma as a key to understanding a wider world torn asunder. But break-up movies tend to resist obvious real-world relevance. These three films all exist in vague fantasy worlds where the defining difficulties of life in our contemporary world don’t exist, where our heroes — all of them men, two out of three pining over lost women and one haunted by an ex-boyfriend — are essentially unaware that anything exists but their own heartbreak, until that outside world barges in and demands their attention. This is as it should be — this is how break-up films work — but it does seem notable that a film festival would devote nearly half of their narrative competition to movies about white men moping. Hey, maybe this *is* realism! Let’s investigate.

Motivated by a free cruise that co-director Ben Chace won in a raffle and shot quasi-surreptitiously on a working luxury liner, Wah Do Dem pulls together an inspired mix of cultural references, mashing up the tropes of classic cruise movies and bad vacation flicks to the tune of stoney reggae. Sean Bones plays Max, a lanky Brooklynite who gets dumped by his girlfriend (Norah Jones), ends up taking their would-be romantic cruise vacation solo, and gets lost in a foreign land. At first sticking pretty faithfully to the lonelyheart movie playbook, Do Dem takes a sharp, unexpected narrative turn about halfway through, morphing from a movie about a boy on a boat looking to heal his broken heart into an almost-horror story about cultural difference and naivete. Traveling Americans don’t get much uglier than Max, with his joke plastic sunglasses, scoffing entitlement and general hipster affectation that threaten to spill over into Napoleon Dynamite territory. Bones turns the character into a caricature of contemporary post-collegiate practical incompetence, which is kind of a brilliant way to critique both American and hipster exceptionalism. It’s also kind of a problem, since there’s no one else in the film to care about. Kevin Bewersdorf shows up briefly as a mysterious stranger, offering hope that Wah Do Dem will turn into some kind of thriller at sea, but he soon disappears in a puff of gay panic.

Speaking of gay panic: strident commentary on homophobia in the film industry is the most annoying thing about Hollywood, je t’aime, an otherwise appealing comedy about a Frenchman who flees a broken relationship in Paris to indulge his dreams of California sunshine and stardom, only to be haunted by visions of the impossibly cute boy he left behind. This is a movie in which an aging drag queen counsels a wannabe actor with solemn warnings about where “Hollywood wants its faggots.” But it’s also a movie that creates a heightened but authentic-feeling portrait of a certain kind of Los Angeles life that’s scrubbed from most representations of the city: here, the streets are full of hookers who are neither pretty nor anatomical women and riding the bus is hard evidence that you’re marginalized. Unfolding with a fluid dream logic, je t’aime pulls off a magic act of translating the milieu of mid-90s Gregg Araki into a mostly sunny comedy with the sweep of a movie with budget exponentially larger. Dem and je t’aime both translate the feeling of being romantically unwanted into geographic displacement and otherness; both critique the cliches of their respective subgenres (one an Emotional Catharsis Through Exotic Roadtrip movie, the other Wacky Gay Romantic Comedy) while shamelessly indulging them.  It’s odd to see two films with very different trappings going through the same basic motion within 24 hours; it’s even odder to imagine a jury evaluating the two against one another.

In the context of this competition, Harmony & Me, about which I’ve already written, feels shockingly idiosyncratic in its comedic voice; up against the movie-movie gloss of Hollywood je t’aime and the confidently styled Do Dem, its indifference to aesthetics is unignorable. Still, I’ve now seen the movie three times, and every time I’ve laughed so hard that I’ve cried. If we’re grading on the ability to smear mascara, it wins.