What’s worse than one clunky love story? Two!
The Last Letter From Your Lover Cert: 12A, 1hr 50mins Stillwater Cert: 15, 2hrs 19mins Zola Cert: 18, 1hr 26mins
Describe a film as a romantic comedy and people tend to have a pretty good idea of what to expect, but describe it as a romance, albeit one with some misfiring comedy, and people can feel uncomfortable. And for a while I thought that was what was wrong with The Last Letter From Your Lover: it was making me uncomfortable simply because it was that rare thing these days – an oldfashioned romance.
Then I watched a bit more and slowly came to a different conclusion: this adaptation of a Jojo Moyes bestseller was making me uncomfortable because it simply wasn’t very good. Echoing the structure of The Notebook but with little of that film’s quality, it unfolds in two timelines.
In the present day, a remarkably unconvincing journalist – played by an off-form Felicity Jones – uncovers some love letters in a newspaper archive. So while she sets about working out who wrote them to whom and who the mysterious ‘Boot’ might be, we jump back to the wealthy, almost swinging London of 1965 – when the letters were originally written – and start wondering the same.
Because, back then, the bewildered, scarred but undeniably still lovely Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley) is married to the superrich, unpleasantly smooth Lawrence (Joe Alwyn).
No sign of a ‘Boot’ here… although she has been in an accident and might be suffering from amnesia…
In a film that will never win awards for its casting, Woodley is no more than OK but does at least have an interesting 1960s wardrobe to wear. But the real damage is done in the present-day storyline, which is clunky and close to torture once it’s been inevitably decided that the only thing better than one love story is, er, two.
Stillwater is clearly inspired by the Amanda Knox story – so much so that Knox, who in 2015 was acquitted of the murder of British room-mate Meredith Kercher but only after spending four years in an Italian prison, has publicly complained.
But it has certainly been heavily fictionalised, with Matt Damon playing a Godfearing Oklahoma oil worker who travels to Marseilles, where his daughter, Allison, is in prison for murdering her girlfriend and flatmate. Ah, but did she actually do it? At almost 140 minutes, this is a long watch as well as a tough one. Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy, best known for Spotlight and The Station Agent, adopts a punishingly slow pace, while Damon comes perilously close to overcooking his performance as a taciturn redneck with no personal skills. But it’s nice to see Camille Cottin – one of the stars of the French TV hit Call My Agent! – gracing a
Hollywood film. And the last lap isn’t bad at all.
Notable for being adapted from a Twitter thread and conceding early on that it’s only ‘mostly true’, Zola is the in-your-face story of a black dancer – Zola – who is persuaded to go to Florida by Stefani, a white girl she’s just met for a working holiday of pole dancing.
But when Stefani turns up with a burly minder, it’s clear there’s a more sinister agenda.
Directed by Janicza Bravo, Zola manages to be as funny as it is frightening and, thanks to superb performances from Taylour Paige and Riley Keough, makes an impact that certainly outlasts the underwhelming ending.
Recommended.