Dir. Drake Doremus, USA, 2011, 90 mins
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Jennifer Lawrence,
Review by Carol Allen
The main message you will take away from this light weight little romance is, beware of upsetting the American immigration authorities, if you want to go there again.
Jacob (Yelchin) and Anna (Jones) are fellow students inLos Angeles. He’s an LA native, she’s from theUK. They meet, fall in love but then Anna’s student visa expires and she’s supposed to go home. “Oh what’s a little visa?”, think the lovers. “Let’s have our summer of love together and sucks to bureaucracy”. There are no repercussions, nomidnightbangings on the door from the immigration heavy mob and at the end of the summer Anna goes home to Mummy and Daddy (Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead). They exchange texts and phone calls, decide they’re still in love. But when Anna tries to get back intoAmericato be reunited with Jacob, she’s stopped at immigration, interrogated and put on the first plane home. And from then on, it’s all about the difficulty of sustaining a love affair when you’re in two different countries, as they keep trying and failing to get Anna permission to return to America.
The stuff of a touching Romeo and Juliet story? Well, not really. For a start, appealing actors though both Jones and Yelchin are, it’s difficult to believe in their overwhelming passion for each other. In the (many, many, many) semi improvised montages that are supposed to convince us of their love, they come over more as a pair of cute kittens snuggling down in their basket than a couple of maturing humans in the throes of something that is bigger than both of them. And when they both meet other potential partners in their own countries – he takes up with Sam (a rather good Jennifer Lawrence), who assists him in the furniture design business he’s building up and she starts to cosy up with her neighbor Simon (Charlie Bewley), one can’t help thinking these are far more promising relationships and they should give up on the fantasy and grow up.
The basic problem is the rather sloppy script, which is short on convincing detail and big on pseudo romantic cliché, not always helped by the sometimes handheld and wobbly camera work. Improvisational techniques can work well on film (think of Mike Leigh) but you’ve then got to hone the inspiration into story and characters, which have a life. Jones is a talented actress and very pretty but she doesn’t have a lot to work with here, though there are some nice mother and daughter moments between her and Kingston, while Yelchin has a similar problem in that he’s being asked to play a rather cardboard cut out selfish drip. They manage at times to touch us with their sweet innocence and unworldliness but that wears thin after a while and even the ”unexpected” ending is by then predictable. By then you don’t care whether they get together or stay apart. You just want to shake them both and say “Get real.”
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xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
