Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jamie Adams
Starring: Haley Bennett, Sam Riley, Marisa Abela
British writer/director Jamie Adams has displayed something of
an obsession with struggling musicians and songwriters in recent films
like
Love Spreads
and Bittersweet Symphony. His latest, She is Love, concerns a musician/songwriter, but that occupation never quite
figures into the narrative in any meaningful way.
Sam Riley is Idris, a once popular singer-songwriter whose
career seems to have hit the skids. We find him running a small hotel in
the English countryside with his budding actress girlfriend Louise (Marisa Abela), but his heart doesn't seem to be in the venture. Enter Idris's
American ex-wife, Patricia (Haley Bennett), who just happens to
book into the hotel.
Initially it seems Adams is about to fashion a sort of Millenial Fawlty
Towers, but despite the film sharing its handheld aesthetic with a dozen
BBC sitcoms, the expected bedroom farce fails to play out. The
compelling comic presence of Abela, as a sort of hipster Sybil Fawlty,
is soon pushed aside as her character somewhat inexplicably decides to
head off and leave her boyfriend alone with his ex-wife.
Adams is known for his improv-heavy style, something he continues here.
This technique worked quite well in Love Spreads, where the characters felt well-defined and convinced us as bandmates
who had spent too much time together. She is Love is so
superficial that it often feels like we're watching a rehearsal rather
than a finished product. Riley and Bennett spend a lot of time coming up
with backstories for their characters on the fly, and as a result they
sometimes trip over their words. Later scenes prove contradictory to
earlier ones, like how Bennett's Patricia throws a strop regarding an
earlier pregnancy, which runs contradictory to a joke she cracked
earlier.
She is Love's flaws might be dismissed as a product of filming in pandemic-era
conditions, but Love Spreads saw Adams and his cast work
in a similarly confined setting. You get the sense that Bennett had
limited time in England, denying the director as much rehearsal time as
he might have liked. Subsequently, She is Love is a film
that seems to be making up its story as it goes. None of its revelations
are particularly interesting, just the sort of everyday issues that tend
to break up relationships.
There's barely enough material to even fill out the film's scant 82
minutes, and in two instances Adams pads out the time by having his cast
either dance or listen to songs. The use of Nick Cave's 'Into My Arms'
is a particularly lazy way of injecting some second-hand melancholy into
a drama that has struggled to establish a mood of its own.
"Sometimes it's better not to rehearse," a character decries at one
point. Perhaps not in this case.
