Director: Aylin Tezel (Germany, UK). Year of Release: 2023
The last bus stop on the Isle of Skye. The passengers get off and make for the nearest pub. In the pub we see a woman earnestly explain to her male companion about stage layout and space. He nods. pretending to find her chatter interesting. He’s really waiting for the moment they can go outside for a smoke so he can make his move. He lunges for a kiss, and the woman is too polite to fully fend him away. As his mates take him away he repeatedly asks her if she’s going to ring him.
Also outside is a man with hipster beard who engages her in conversation, saying that he was starting to feel like a spare part. They continue with a flirty conversation which can be a fantastic experience if you’re in the middle of it, but is excruciatingly embarrassing to watch. They race each other, each encourages the other to take on a character role, and they even start a departure dance, before he complains that he doesn’t want to leave.
In the “banter” which ensures (it can hardly be categorised as intelligent conversation), Ian produces his cod theory that the woman, Kira, is a “runaway” like himself. This is, if anything, an attempt to avoid any meaningful dialogue, and instead to build up a cod affinity which he can use to get in her pants. For a film which is supposed to be about the eternal mental bond between two star crossed lovers, I don’t remember any scenes where either partner shares any understanding.
Ian is back in Skye to visit his relatives, even though he barely exchanges a word with his parents. Instead he asks Kira to wait outside for 2 minutes while he takes round his dad’s prescription, which Ian has just picked up from the chemists. Filial obligations fulfilled, he leaves and takes Kira to a local cafe for breakfast. When the locals ask Ian how his sister is doing, he replies vaguely, as it is perfectly clear that he has had no contact with her for a long time.
And why is Kira in Skye? Well, we don’t find out till later, as Ian never bothers to ask (this becomes more clear in a later scene when one of Ian’s mates asks about Kira and he clearly knows nothing about her). Actually, she is a set designer who was born in Germany, but has no more contact with her parents. She is visiting Skye to get over the end of a relationship with Aidan, an actor, who – if I understand correctly – she also met in Skye.
Kira’s way of getting over her loss is to have long flirty walks over the moors with Ian. Then Ian drops a bombshell. Kira asks jokily whether he has a girlfriend, ans he answers “yes”. Kira’s face drops and she grows very cold, but not so cold that she doesn’t carry on following him around the island. He looks nonplussed at the idea that the girlfriend factor will make any difference to the fact that he’s already told Kira that he’s been trying to shag her ever since he first saw her.
Both return to London and lose contact. Ian returns to his girlfriend and gets very annoyed when people from the record industry tell him that his music is ok, but has no real character. One A&R guy assures him that for a song to be successful it needs to have strong lyrics. This in a film whose key musical scene is set to the music of Cutting Crew’s I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight (sample lyric: “Her diary, it sits by the bedside table, The curtains are closed, the cats in the cradle”).
It’s obvious where this is happening, right? It’s the show that Ian is a self-absorbed egomaniac who never pays attention to anyone but himself and leeches off the women in his life. We learn that he has not seen his sister in 10 years, during which she has made 3 suicide attempts. So, Kira had a narrow escape not ending up with someone so vacuous. Except the way in which the camera focusses on Ian all the time implies that we are meant to see him as a misunderstood tragic hero.
Besides which, the film tells us that Kira is no better. She visits Aidan, her ex, who looks just like Ian. She pleads with him to get back together, ignoring his soft rebuttals that their relationship was not good for either of them, and that it was her who broke up with him. It surprized me to learn that the script was written by the director Aylin Tezel, who also plays Kira, as I presumed that the writer was a man who believed that women have no dignity when confronted with a pretty man.
At one stage, Kira offers her theory that we continue to repeat the same mistakes, until we get bored with them, forcing us to change our behaviour. We are presumably expected to find this a profound insight as it’s repeated later in the film. It may indeed be a strategy which works for someone like Ian who is happy to live rent-free in the house that his girlfriend’s father bought, but for most of us, solving our problems takes more than overcoming a little boredom.
Look, I’m probably not the target audience for a romantic comedy with no jokes, but surely even people more disposed to this sort of thing would prefer romantic leads who aren’t quite so objectionable and needy. The film requires us to spend time with people who I would avoid like the plague if I met them in real life, and would not give a shit whether they get together. It is also a discredit to workers in the Arts who are almost universally portrayed as privileged yuppies.
And this is before we talk about the most appalling coincidence on which the plot hinges. Assuming that there may be some people out there who still want to watch this (and take it from me, you do this without my approval). I will just say that Ian goes down a road which he has never visited in his life and randomly enters the very building where he needs to be for the plot to make any sense. It is risible. Which sadly reflects the lack of thought put into the film as a whole.
CinePhil 