(Bodies in motion: a gilded young couple in the ecstasy of love in Drake Doremus' third feature, Like Crazy. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.)
The young filmmaker Drake Doremus makes a startling and tremendous forward leap technically and aesthetically with his third feature Like Crazy, a French New Wave-inflected mood piece charting the jagged and unpredictable emotional currents of a young couple.
The film marks the second consecutive year the 27-year-old Doremus has premiered a movie in the Sundance dramatic competition. The new work captured the grand jury prize.
Last year’s Douchebag featured some compelling parts, but the whole was damaged by the spectacularly ill-conceived central character whose extreme self-regard and neurosis made the work extremely difficult to make a useful or exciting connection.
Doremus worked on the script with Ben York Jones, who played the second lead in Douchebag. That second feature was fairly harsh and abrasive. The new work is elliptical and impressionistic, shot largely hand held, and like most of the touchstones it is indebted to, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless or John Cassavetes’s Shadows, the movie has an impulsive and gliding quality that colors the mood and tone and yields a fresh and lovely texture.
At the same time the movie is likely to severely divide people. As storytelling the movie requires some fundamental leaps of logic and plausibility. At times the movie’s almost too much of a good thing. Doremus sacrifices character depth for style and form. In the second half he strains for some dramatic contrasts and symbolism that proves a little emphatic.
Even so, the imperfect parts never cancel out what is distinctive and interesting. The characters are wiling to plunge into difficult areas, and the movie has a limber, avid quality, a sense of quest, that propels the material constantly forward. The movie examines the intoxicating possibility of love and loss with both seriousness and tact.
The story details the tense, prickly and unconventional relationship between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). Their attraction seems inevitable. The two are introduced as they approach their graduation from a Los Angeles university. She’s a British exchange student studying journalism, beautiful, bright, and terrifically composed. He’s a ruggedly good looking charmer with a sensitive side who makes eclectic furniture.
She initiates matters with a deeply confessional note (“I hope you don’t think I’m a nutcase,” she writes). In one swoop, the two are feverishly drawn to each other, inseparable and intoxicated by the lyrical possibilities of love and solidarity. Doremus and his very talented cinematographer John Guleserian work in tight, compacted spaces and a narrow depth of field that annotates the sense of rupture and excitement between the two.
The filmmaking is mostly tactile and expressive and captured in a rush of often spellbinding imagery, like a reverse angle shot of Jacob riding a go-cart, overwhelmed by the speed and exhilaration of the moment. Like the romantic reveries of Wong Kar-Wai, the filmmakers keep the camera close to the actors bodies; it pivots, dances and swirls around their bodies in creating an ecstatic whirl.
If the opening movement has a liquid flow, the middle and closing passages are shaded by a darker and more pessimistic register. The nature of their relationship is forever changed by a seemingly unremarkable personal action when, in the heat of a passionate “last night,” Anna overstays the requirements of her student visa after the idea of separation from Jacob proves unbearable.
The decisions proves astonishingly reckless a couple of weeks later when Anna is detained by immigration authorities in Los Angeles and repatriated to London. Immediately the tone shifts from surrender and possibility to something far more difficult and complicated.
As the story shuttles between Los Angeles and London, careening between the fluid shifts in attitudes and feelings between the two, the inevitable confusion and uncertainty about the relationship erupts.
The two are suddenly forced apart, the difficulties of the relationship further complicated by their rising professional careers. Anna lands a job at a prominent London magazine and Jacob’s custom made furniture business flourishes. The separation naturally brings about stain and confusion. Jacob proves particularly aloof and distant, a sharp contrast to Anna’s persistent need for approval.
The writing is graceful and understated, the imagery succinct and movingly precise. If the opening movement was predicated on a dazzling speed, the middle and closing passages are much more mournful, delicate and haunting. Doremus and his excellent young actors are very good at illustrating the disrupted tempos. As the early excitement and deep attraction subsides, the two must negotiate a more difficult emotional terrain of shifting needs, control and independence.
Separated and confused, the two are suddenly drawn to others. Jacob enters into a relationship with Samantha (Jennifer Lawrence). Anna is more circumspect and probably feels guilty, though even she eventually surrenders to her own needs and takes up with her good looking neighbor, Simon (Charlie Bewley).
Like Crazy moves tentatively from there, the time passing quickly, but it sharply delineates the rancor, disappointment and jealousy of the central relationship. As the second half is related through a series of contrasts, the telling proves both unpredictable and cruel. It may not always make narrative sense but it never shrugs from pain and violation in exploring the consequences of tumult and excitement.
It also has two sharp and compelling performances that underline however volatile and moody the relationship, they seem permanently bound.
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