I loved almost every word of this script. With so much other great writing under his belt, I'm not sure how Victor Levin is able to remain in his skin. Even the ordinary words are placed like jewels in the sky. Most of the voice-over narrative read like a great literary novel, as it should. Certain other parts were also beyond well-done, for instance, the "good-bye" letter from Arielle. I wouldn't change a word.
However, the casting did not reach to touch what the words were attempting to make flesh. The main character, Brian Bloom, was too young or too underwhelming or too lacking in passion to meet the expectations and hopes I had for his character; the love interets, Arielle Pierpont, was too predictable of a classic, standard-issue French lover to be believed as someone who would throw her entire life away, to give her heart to such a young man. Both needed something extra or different to create the needed chemistry for them to be sympathetic to the viewer--Brian to be more outwardly passionate and perhaps mature, Arielle to be covertly needier and quirkier than a collected dipomat's wife might be. I stayed with them in their affair, but more for what I had hoped for them than what they actually shared. For any romantic movie, the lovers must match. For this film, the lovers needed not just match, but create an epic type of passion that drags the viewer in an causes the viewer to be just as heartbroken, just as destroyed as the characters themselves. And, yes, the parting destroyed him and her both.
Yes, time and a more mature view of life gave them both the ability to embrace the gift they had for that moment of time. But that gratitude could have been much greater if the on-screen passion of the actors and the desire of the characters themselves were also splashed across the screen with a little more of a Jackson Pollack type of abandon. '
If the casting and direction were a bit more senstive, this could have been another Dr. Zhivago but with less production costs.
Would I watch it again? Sure! But only if it were a rainy day, I had plenty of popcorn, and I could share it with a woman I had a secret crush on.
However, the casting did not reach to touch what the words were attempting to make flesh. The main character, Brian Bloom, was too young or too underwhelming or too lacking in passion to meet the expectations and hopes I had for his character; the love interets, Arielle Pierpont, was too predictable of a classic, standard-issue French lover to be believed as someone who would throw her entire life away, to give her heart to such a young man. Both needed something extra or different to create the needed chemistry for them to be sympathetic to the viewer--Brian to be more outwardly passionate and perhaps mature, Arielle to be covertly needier and quirkier than a collected dipomat's wife might be. I stayed with them in their affair, but more for what I had hoped for them than what they actually shared. For any romantic movie, the lovers must match. For this film, the lovers needed not just match, but create an epic type of passion that drags the viewer in an causes the viewer to be just as heartbroken, just as destroyed as the characters themselves. And, yes, the parting destroyed him and her both.
Yes, time and a more mature view of life gave them both the ability to embrace the gift they had for that moment of time. But that gratitude could have been much greater if the on-screen passion of the actors and the desire of the characters themselves were also splashed across the screen with a little more of a Jackson Pollack type of abandon. '
If the casting and direction were a bit more senstive, this could have been another Dr. Zhivago but with less production costs.
Would I watch it again? Sure! But only if it were a rainy day, I had plenty of popcorn, and I could share it with a woman I had a secret crush on.