There are potentially interesting things in this love story, written by veteran Dutch film-maker Ate de Jong, and co-directed with British editor and director Emily Harris, who has worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and served as a consultant on the excellent documentary version of the V&A’s David Bowie exhibition.
This is a very personal, autobiographical story, pretty indulgent and sometimes a bit insufferable, with some jarringly hammy, misjudged notes. But there’s a good cast doing an honest job. Lydia Wilson and Johnny Flynn play Vida and Arthur, twentysomethings in love: one is a well-off Jewish Londoner, the other a working-class guy from Port Talbot. She’s a cellist; he’s a would-be animator. This fraught, live-in relationship is complicated further when they are about to break up just as they both suffer family bereavements, and so are forced closer together.
Henry Goodman and Juliet Stevenson play Vida’s parents; Ellie Kendrick plays her sister. It’s a little frustrating: if the movie had concentrated on fewer characters, or fewer events, they might have been developed more richly, more subtly and more plausibly.
