Preamble

Unlike the film under discussion today, there’s no great drama to my recent blogging absence. It’s just the regular work being busy and feeling a little under the weather. This is a particular shame as I felt I was on a good writing streak with my recent cinema release reviews.

However, that’s all water under the bridge now. For now, it’s great to be back and tackling a movie I don’t typically go for, but have certain films I value within the broader definition of the genre. So, with that said, have you been caught up in the Drama this weekend? Let me know in the comments below.

Review

Boy meets girl, falls in love, loses girl via contrivance and eventually gets the girl (whilst running against the clock in a fast moving environment). Whether you gender bend these narrative elements or add a slight variant, these are by and large the plot points of romance movies. 

The best ones often go deeper with penetrating questions about the nature of a relationship or the ugly dimensions of love and what it means to fully embrace it. The Drama falls squarely in the realm of interesting romance movies with its unflinching and multi faceted approach to its premise.

The film is about the fallout after a confession that Emma (Zendaya) makes about her past to her friends and fiancé- Charlie (Robert Pattinson). To make matters worse, the central pair are due to married in a few days.

The Drama uses its irksome and yikes inducing premise to ask how we handle and live with difficult truths about our partners. It does this by placing Charlie in sequences where he sees a younger version of Emma. The film already plays with time as the opening depicts the meeting of the central couple through Charlie looking back as he writes a wedding speech. 

But these sequences that evoke the spirit of Rye Lane, (whereby the characters entered each other’s spaces and memories) have a much more jarring quality. They’re akin to a form of cinematic empathy bonding that plays to the conflict of understanding and paranoia that plagues one of the main players. 

In fact, much of the Drama’s source of black comedy comes from the typical wedding preparations having a newfound edge. The prolonged sequence involving the event photographer is a particular highlight.

At the same time, the direction has the intimacy of ballet dance as it closely examines the central couple through extreme close-ups and patiently calibrated medium shots where behaviour is observed. 

In his performance as Charlie, Robert Pattinson does channel the nebbish charm that Hugh Grant brought to a lot of his early roles. But he also injects the character with an affable kookiness that hints at a stranger side. Perhaps more than any of her previous performances, Zendaya proves how much talent she has as a silent actor. In fact, some of her best moments come in the tail end of the film where she carries the weight of anger and empathy via her facial expressions. And Alana Haim is a melodramatic treat as Emma’s fiery maid of honour- Rachel.

Above all, the emotional truth of the movie comes from how much we do to ourselves to live with our partner’s baggage. It’s almost as though we try to lessen ourselves, so that knowledge that we previously bristled at, suddenly seems permissible compared to what we’ve just done. In this regard, I was reminded of Eyes Wide Shut and its depiction of how an emotional equilibrium is reached between its married characters. The same thing could be said of Emma and Charlie in reconciling the past and the present.