Which Brings Me to You review – mostly charming romcom is worth puckering up for
The maxim “expect little, forgive much” is apparently how to approach marriage; it may be a little depressing in real life, but it’s not a bad rule for movie romcoms, a genre in which, for whatever reason, the bar is extraordinarily low. For every His Girl Friday or When Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings, there are thousands of direct-tostreaming timewasters; if the films’ frequent lesson is that you’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, it also applies to the films themselves.
Happily, this will-they-won’t-they between two adorable wedding guests (Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff) may not feature an actual prince, he’s closer to a handsome dude in a crown than a lil fella on a lily-pad; by romcom standards, that’s a pretty solid recommendation to pucker up and give it a chance. Points in its favour include the relative humanity of the leads, who are both shockingly easy on the eye, and the characters they play are still recognisably rounded, flawed and mostly charming human beings. Early on they get together briefly, which means that we’re in for a film mostly about whether they will get back together. (As opposed to the romcom’s other favourite arc of having the characters dislike each other at the start and gradually move towards each other.) The reasons they are not immediately united are relatively convincing, being based on relatable complications that actually keep people from finding each other. Nobody here is working for the evil corporation that wants to shut down the cute little bakery run by the other party.
The protracted nature of unpacking all of these issues does wear slightly thin by the end of the film – perhaps one or two items of baggage could have been conveniently misplaced at script stage. The longer it goes on, the more we find ourselves in therapy-land, in contrast to the zingy, zesty territory in which we began. Maybe some of the people involved wanted to make a grownup drama with tragic elements, while others aimed to follow through with a movie that resembles the opening sequence, which has a big band cover of It Had to Be You playing over slow-mo footage of confetti fluttering through the air. But at least that tension is interesting, and the result far from frog.
• Which Brings Me to You is released on 12 February on digital platforms.