Love at First Sight
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
A movie like this rises and falls with its actors. The screenplay by Katie Lovejoy, adapted from the book by Jennifer E. Smith, is pure sentimental and conventional young love formula. Fortunately, this film has Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy at its center, and they are absolutely wonderful. They make us believe all the story beats we’ve seen dozens of times because they feel genuinely engaged with one another. This film is a winner for me.
One of the moments that flattened people most last year was the climax of “Aftersun,” and its unorthodox use of David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” I don’t know if I’d say Morgan Harper-Jones’s cover of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is quite on that level, but in this film- with both of these characters so uncertain about how they feel about love when they first meet (but very certain about how they feel about one another)- when this track hits, it’s one of those beautiful examples of a song used just right that it’s going to stick with you.
Since I first watched “Simply Irresistible,” a 1999 romantic comedy-drama with Sarah Michelle Gellar, I’ve been a fan of its charm, and how it went about its business with its main characters. Vanessa Caswill’s film reminds me of that one in how unique its approach to the formula is, and most importantly, how it doesn’t take the easy way to romance between its main characters. Hadley, played by Richardson, is someone who is almost always, invariably, late, pushing things to the brink of disaster, even something as simple as charging her phone. For instance, it’s because she is four minutes late for her flight to London that she ends up on the same flight as Oliver, Hardy’s character, who is the young man she just borrowed a phone charger from in the bar. When his seat belt doesn’t work on the flight, he finds himself sitting next to her; they are both going to London for major events involving their parents, and there is anxiety for both in that proposition.
Richardson is someone whom I’ve only become familiar with over the past couple of years, but every time I’ve seen her has been something special. She just has a natural charisma that makes even the tougher moments with the character interesting to watch. Here, she’s seeing her father for the first time in a year…at his wedding to a woman she has never met. We see, in flashback, the moment she realized her family life as she knew it was over, and she doesn’t know if she can look at her father the same way. Seeing how her character maneuvers that emotional minefield in quiet, subtle ways is one of my favorite things this year, especially when you consider that Oliver is going through the same thing. Hardy is fantastic as a son who’s getting ready to say goodbye to his mother, but as we find out, his journey is just as fraught and complicated as Hadley’s is. How they get to their respective places is a delight from start to finish. I’ll admit, the narrator choice the film goes with- which I’m guessing is held over from the book- doesn’t work that well for me, but as this is a film about unlikely probabilities, I went with it, because these characters earned it. This film won me over from moment one.
