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Falling in love is exciting. Falling in love is magical. It's scary and it's terrifying - but it's surprisingly easy. Staying in love.That's the hard bit. Maintaining passion and respect while at the same time negotiating both the everyday and the extraordinary while at the same time remembering what it was that brought you together in the first place and where it is that you're heading for while, all the time, having to make compromises and deal with whatever life, that sometimes cruel bastard, throws at you.
Harry Wootliff's new film, Only You, does a superb job of showing both the thrill of new love and the hard work and difficult decisions that go into ensuring that the course of that love be allowed to run. Not smoothly. Of course. Nothing ever really runs smoothly. That's not how real life works, and if Wootliff's film can be crudely condensed into any one adjective the one I'd choose would be 'real'.
Ahead of 'romantic', 'heartbreaking', and even 'sad'. The realness seeps into this movie in both its prosaic Glaswegian locations, dialogue in which people speak like people you might actually know - sometimes quite poetically but often swearing or making silly jokes, and, more than anything, the two lead performances. Both Josh O'Connor (as Jake) and Laia Costa (as Elena) hold you spellbound every second they're on screen.
Their performances are what raise Wootliff's film to the level of a minor classic and the sadness and frustration you'll come to recognise in their faces as the film develops will more than likely result in you getting something in your eye. A big ol' teardrop, probably.
The basic plot (don't worry - no spoilers here) is that Elena has spent New Year's Eve at a party with her mid-thirties friends. Her friend's brother is trying to cop off with her but she's not interested so she heads home. She thinks she's hailed a taxi only to find 26 year old Josh is the driver's intended fare, she ends up joining him in the cab, inviting him back to hers, and soon enough - very quickly actually, she finds herself in a relationship with him that's as fiercely passionate as it is underscored by small romantic gestures.
Josh moves in to Elena's flat in virtually no time at all, their trousers and pants are on and off more often than the lights, they lie on the sofa cuddling and rubbing each other's feet, chatting about music, life, and hopes for the future. Anyone who's ever been excited to be in a new relationship will recognise all the signs. Constant checking of the phone, counting the days down until you see someone again, a reluctance to say goodbye without one more kiss. Depending on your current level of cynicism you'll either feel utterly overjoyed for and by them - or totally repulsed.
Luckily, I'm in the former camp. A romantic at heart. But Wootliff's film shows how ideas of romance alone are not enough to make things work. Great, and humorous initially, play is made of the near ten year age gap between Elena and Josh (it's a neat reversal of stereotype that the woman is the older partner) but there's also the matter of Josh's idealistic appraisal of his parents' seemingly perfect marriage (his mother had died young) with Elena's more hard bitten experience of hearing her mum suffer as her dad carried out a series of affairs and all but ruined her childhood.
It doesn't do any harm whatsoever that Costa is beautiful and O'Connor is handsome. They're not so much as to be unreal and sometimes, with sadness or anger, their faces are almost bent out of shape but this gives them a humanity and a depth that other films on this subject can sometimes lack. You'll have heard people say stuff like "you're so sexy when you're angry" or "you look beautiful when you're sad" and you may well feel they're dumb things to say, lame attempts at playing get out of jail free cards, but Only You may disabuse you of this notion. When these two look angry and sad you just want them to have a hug. Hell, I even wanted to jump in to the screen and hug them myself.
Either O'Connor or Costa are on the screen almost all the time, quite often both of them together, so there's little room for the bit part players to make much of an impact on the film but credit should go to Peter Wight (you may recognise him as one of the bent coppers on Early Doors, he also recently appeared on This Time With Alan Partridge) as Josh's kindly father whose perfunctory attempts at Spanish and accepting nature create an immediate bond with Elena.
It's credit to Wootliff that Elena's nationality is no more relevant than the colour of her eyes. This is a film, and a story, that could be set in any large cosmopolitan city in the world. It's a story as old as time, as love stories should be, and even when the modern world (IVF, mobile phones, busy and complicated lives) come into play it's mere detail compared with the absolutely vital business of getting to know one's heart and one's own motivations so as to hopefully understand a loved one's heart and a loved one's motivations.
The fact that Wootliff has made a film in which she's sewed together and then deftly unpicked the stitching of such a complex and deep relationship shows she's got her heart in the right place and her motivations are sound. A heartbreaking film for sure, but also a life affirming one that shows that though none of us are perfect, most of us simply want to love and to be loved in return. A message that bears repeating as often as you'll hear Elvis Costello sing "I Want You" on the sound track.
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