Movie Review: Like Crazy

The movies don’t do romantic longing very well any more. It’s trickier than it was in the old “An Affair to Remember” days, when love on the big screen had patience.

But Felicity Jones will break your heart at least once in “Like Crazy.” As Anna, she knows the affair she started as a British college student studying in Los Angeles is doomed, by distance and by the times.

It was impulsive of her to write a long letter confessing her interest in the shy teaching assistant Jacob (Anton Yelchin) as their college careers ended. It was impulsive of her to overstay her student visa just to be with him. And it’s an unfiltered impulse that makes her call him, her voice cracking, after they’ve agreed to be practical and go their separate ways in separate countries.

“It just doesn’t feel that this thing is going to go away. We should be with each other.“

And maybe we agree with Anna, as persuasive as she can be. Or maybe we’re like Jacob – moved by her, devoted to her, but pragmatic enough to realize that at their age and in this age, merely loving somebody “like crazy” won’t be enough.

“Like Crazy” is writer-director Drake Doremus’s take on modern long-distance romance, with its many new obstacles in addition to the classic ones that generations have dealt with. Many a lover facing the prospect of a long distance affair has been moved to quote John Donne’s poem, “A Valediction: forbidding mourning,” in which he scoffs at couples who can’t handle separation, and compares his two lovers to points of a drawing compass — extended, but connected, even when they’re apart.

But Donne was writing hundreds of years before sexting, easy hook-ups and two-career couples. And all those work against Anna and Jacob in “Like Crazy.” They share the blush of youth, of seriousness about their respective art forms — she’s a writer, he’s a furniture designer — and a love of Paul Simon’s classic “Graceland” album.

But they’re from two different sides of the planet. And when she makes that fateful decision to overstay that visa, the obstacles pile up on this couple we’re meant to root for, through thick and thin.

Doremus (“Spooner”) has written a quiet film  — thin on dialogue, but filled with meaningful silences. An “I love you” is left hanging in the air, jealousy is in the open even if the arguments it causes are never closed. We glimpse the couple through a distant diner window, or spy them through trees in an English park.  We don’t see them in the throes of sexual passion, though we do see them with other partners.

Yelchin (the new Mr. Chekov in the “Star Trek” franchise), the occasional tear notwithstanding, seems as distant as some of those beautifully framed shots. Jacob and Anna are equally feckless when it comes to fidelity (He takes up with Jennifer Lawrence of “Winter’s Bone,” she with Charlie Bewley from “The Twilight Saga”).   But Yelchin doesn’t generate the same warmth or passion that Jones does. That is partly by design, as this whole affair was her idea, after all.

And it is a design flaw. “Like Crazy,” despite being bathed in the warm glow of young love, only rarely earns a tear, only occasionally insists that we shout “Hang the practicality! You kids HAVE to be together!”

In it’s own way, that’s a good thing, a worthy message to impart to young people new to that first great love. But then, getting the under-25s to go to a romance that’s not a romantic comedy isn’t as easy as it was when “An Affair to Remember,” or even “Sleepless in Seattle,” were new to cinemas.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and brief strong language.

Cast: Felicity Jones, Anton YElchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Alex Kingston

Credits: Written and directed by Drake Doremus, a Paramount Vantage release. Running time: 1:30.

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‘Beni Unutma’: Another romance gone brittle

Her presence was necessary to test whether I have become a cynic when it comes to the digestion of the İstanbulites’ nauseating middle-class love problems. Her profound cultural knowledge and emotional familiarity of the passing decade’s Turkish soap operas was rather useful in proving that indeed I am a bitter cynic with extremely high expectations of genuineness from a love story and that she remains content with settling for clichés along with bad editing and pace if the lead characters look desirable and are essentially just well-meaning kids with unlucky destinies.

In fact, my mother was rather disappointed when she realized that I was not crying at the end credits as she was wiping away her tears. She called me heartless.

Even if I am heartless and rather not fond of “Beni Unutma,” which is the newest derivative to the Turkish bourgeoisie romance genre (the contemporary cousin of the Yeşilçam melodramas that was started by Çağan Irmak’s “Issız Adam,” one must give credit to the filmmakers who succeed in accessing their target audience so cunningly, their audience being my mother, her friends and a select group of young women who are in love with lead Mert Fırat’s screen persona and possess a passion for scrutinizing carefully decorated set-pieces that could be in an issue of Maison Française.

But of course it all starts on a meet-cute. Adorable Vespa-riding modern elf Olcay (first-timer Açelya Devrim Yılhan) stumbles upon her hunky boyfriend (Kenan Ece) cheating on her, while Sinan (Fırat), who is engaged to the blond bombshell Ebru (Tuba Ünsal), has realized that the conventions and familial duties of marriage cramp his style. Olcay’s BFF Sevda (Melis Babadağ) takes her out to their favorite hipster bar for a couple of drinks, while Sinan’s male entourage is listening to his ranting about how he can’t handle the thought of his ex-fiancée’s mother. Then Sinan notices Olcay, they exchange one-line pleasantries that are the fruit of a failed attempt at writing flirty dialogue between a man and a woman. As the convention of love at first sight dictate, they are in love with each other on the spot.

Then follows a long montage sequence of approximately 20 minutes that is more suitable for a music video than a motion picture. The sequence shows these two beautiful people wandering the streets, holding hands, playing games, cuddling and making funny jokes while dressed for a catalogue shoot for Vogue. At some point Sinan introduces Olcay to his stern widow mother, while Olcay introduces Sinan to her poem-loving widowed father. They are the perfect pieces of the puzzle, really; they both have one dead parent and a curiously disturbing Freudian relationship with the living one. Our sweeter-than-sugar couple gets married in the most romantic setting that Marie Claire’s best wedding locations list can come up with and eventually conceives a child. We think that the rest of the film is going to be about how marital love fades away to middle class boredom, but no, the film suddenly turns about 180 degrees to a new focus and hits the couple with an agonizing tragedy.

Unfortunately I must insist on a spoiler: Olcay suddenly finds out that she is suffering from a rare kind of Alzheimer’s disease which will eventually rip her away of all her bodily functions and make her forget everything. Sinan is devastated, while Olcay is trying to hold on to dear life. Olcay has already started to act as if Sinan and their child do not exist. At this point the film transforms into a TV movie of the week special in which we unwillingly and methodically learn how a person with such an unfortunate disease withers away and we must succumb to the sorrow of poor Sinan as he slowly loses his wife. Here the filmmakers try to invoke the same kind of cathartic sensation when watching Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw in “Love Story.” It is for you to decide whether it works, but for some of us I assure it doesn’t.

The performances of leads Fırat and Yılhan are what make the film watchable, but an underdeveloped and unfocused script (despite its potential), poor pace and the lack of convincing sub-plots and supporting characters make “Forget Me Not” a forgettable watch for those who are expecting more from a filmmaker such as Kızıltan, the directorial talent behind the award-winning film “Takva: A Man’s Fear Of God.”

‘Beni Unutma’ (Forget Me Not)

Directed by:

Özer Kızıltan

 Genre: drama

Cast: Mert Fırat, Açelya Devrim Yılhan, Tuba Ünsal, Kenan Ece

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