"One way" - a movie review

"One way" - a review..

A young bespectacled girl with large black eyes meets a young debonair Upper middle class boy at graduation day in 1988 ; goes to his apartment hoping to spend a night together; end up committing to be friends and not to be entangled in a physical relationship. They meet each other on July the 15th each year to exchange notes on their happiness, travails, challenges and dreams that the previous year had bequeathed to them; bond deeper, and part ways again to pursue their individual paths. Emma wishes to be writer, Dexter moves direction-less between one promiscuous relationship to another; drugging himself to numbness; hosting a flashy depthless TV show, but all along pining for that elusive unconditional, unselfish love that poets and artists have veiled our eyes with for ages now..

Literature has a term for such stoic relationships. They call it "Platonic" - indicating the possibility of fulfillment only within the interiors of ones burdened self, and never to attain fruition in reality. But , such an interpretation is not being fair to the Master. In all of Plato's writings, he wanted humanity to turn away from the world of shadows, and be bathed in the balmy heat of practical living. But yet, for ages now, our ideal of love, romance and "eternal" bonding has always been an intellectual masturbation divorced from the co-mingling of flesh. Can a Young vibrant male, and a Smart , good looking young female remain connected only in their brains and never in the body? Does the touch of physical passion corrupt the pure ties of idealistic love and relationships. Do we not in the inner depths of being silently ache for physical union, but hold ourselves back because of relentless ethical conditioning, social conventions and a paranoid indoctrination against the temptations of flesh? Our conventional world of morality, ethics and religion revolve around this dubious question..

Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess bring out the sensitivity, pain and joy of living such a relationship. For twenty three years, they hold their act together; and their performance on screen shows the signs and scars of living in denial. But unfortunately, for me, the movie leaves a unsatisfactory taste at the end of it. Based on David Nicholls novel by the same name, it fails to capture the subtle nuances of a flowing relationship. Following the book, the movie (for some strange reason) is also broken into chapters; and the gaps are yawning and too deep to give us any sense of evolving maturity and dilemma of its protagonists. One had to be Kurosawa, Polanski, Tarantino or Coppola to pull that off . Lone Scherfig, the director is still learning the art of her creative trade, definitely displays a lot of talent and attention to detail..

What would generally go unnoticed, unappreciated in a film like this is the impeccable, well crafted musical score of Rachel Portman. She is one the finest composers for the screen in this generation. An Academy award winner , Ms. Portman's assemblage of instruments to underline the ebb and flow of emotions that spark between Emma and Dexter elevated to a great degree what otherwise would have sunk low as a mundane piece of cinematography. I must be frank to admit, that during some parts of this film, I was listening more to Music than watching the frames go by...

In all, this is a satisfactory movie. I would not want to rate this very highly. But certainly, the story raises a few important questions, in a rather blunt manner; and like a good appetizer leaves an intellectual viewer something to mull over...

God bless...