When we first saw this theatrical trailer for the movie, my friend Lucy and I scoffed. The trailer seemed to cover the entire film's story in two minutes, leaving us with no reason to actually watch it. While I was impressed with the cast (Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones have done some great work in the few movies or TV series I've seen them in) and the added prestige of winning the Grand Jury Prize, this seemed like a strangely predictable movie that had suffered from overzealous trailer marketing. Man was I wrong.
Most of the the events that take place in the trailer finish within the first 20 minutes or so of the film. And for the remaining 70 minutes, I was spellbound as I watched these two people rebuild and destroy their relationship multiple times, caught in a vicious cycle of horrendous timing and the whims of the visa-issuing bureaucrats at Homeland Security. The story goes like this: Jacob and Anna meet in college and fall in love. Anna is British and upon graduation has to leave the country. Unwilling to leave Jacob, she decides to stay for the summer on her expired student visa. She has to go to England in September for a wedding and when she returns a week later on a tourist visa, she is deported back to England without even a chance to see Jacob at the airport. And thus begins the long and painful journey of these two estranged people as they face multiple hurdles, go to extraordinary lengths to preserve their relationship, try to forget each other, and then come running back. Love is very much a destructive force that keeps these characters stuck in the past and dealing with all the "what ifs?" of their situation, instead of moving forward with their lives. And while you never know what new twist is going to take place in their relationship, the very ending of the film is ambiguous and leaves you with more questions than answers. These kind of endings always delight me because they can provoke so much fervent discussion among friends. So if nothing else, I urge you to see this film and then do battle with me in the comments about what you think happens after the end.
The movie is shot beautifully, capturing every naked emotion on the actors' faces as well as the gorgeous locations in both LA and London. Some moments on the handheld camera are a little shaky and may induce Blair Witch-style headaches, but for the most part the cinematography is intimate and throws you right into this world. The actors were just given an outline of the scenes and told to improvise their lines, which lends a searing sense of authenticity to these characters. There are long pauses as they search for what to say and banter that seems to genuinely delight or amuse them. There are also several silent montages where the two of them are shown together over a series of frames and and then suddenly there's only one person staring longingly at the empty space where the other was a few days ago.
The whole film is colored by an aching sense of the passage of time and it is disconcerting to see how much changes in a few short years. But it is even more disconcerting to contemplate how much more could have changed (for the better? for the worse?) if these two weren't so devastatingly in love.
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