‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Pretty self-explanatory
Post Reply
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by sweetest punch »

buzz wrote:I’ve just see trailer to new film Only You. Has EC song playing throughout!

https://www.curzonartificialeye.com/onl ... urzongroup
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/j ... sh-oconnor

Only You review: a sad, tender and gloriously sexy love story

Instant attraction on New Year’s Eve – and a little white lie – lead a young couple down the poignant path from passion to heartache

4 out of 5 stars.

Movies about love at first sight are common enough and so are movies that track the bittersweet season cycle of a relationship’s first year. Then there are movies about a relationship further down the road, brutally tested by the agony of fertility treatment – such as Tamara Jenkins’s excellent Private Life, from 2018 – involving older people who have had ample time to jettison any youthfully naive illusions they may have had about themselves, about each other and about life itself. The marvel of this Glasgow-set debut film from writer-director Harry Wootliff is to make these genres overlap. It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

There is enormous tenderness and sensuality in the lead performances: from Spanish actor Laia Costa, the star of Sebastian Schipper’s single-take thriller Victoria (2015) and from Josh O’Connor, previously seen in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) and shortly to play Prince Charles in Netflix’s The Crown. They are respectively Elena and Jake: she is working in arts centre administration and he is a postgrad student doing research in marine biology.

Wootliff playfully creates an opening situation of almost Richard Curtis-style romcomness. Elena is hanging out with friends her own age at a New Year’s Eve party. They are all in their mid-thirties and are deep into conversations about relationships, coupledom, singledom. Elena herself is single and she is being seriously hit on by a pretty good-looking man known to her female friends as a nice sort, a solid guy – and a catch.

But Elena isn’t sure and she feels that kissing someone at a party and going home with them involves a greater commitment than it might have done 10 years previously. But should she just get over herself and settle?

Tired, uncertain, unhappy, queasy from that particularly joyless kind of drinking that only happens on New Year’s Eve, Elena leaves the party and tries to flag down a taxi, which ignores her and swerves instead to Jake (O’Connor) further down the pavement. Mortified at Elena’s protests, Jake offers to share the taxi with her and things develop in the time-honoured way.

But Elena makes a fateful judgment call back at her place: Jake is only 26 and she – eager not to freak him out – pretends that she is only a couple of years older. On the face of it, this is not a very serious problem. They are passionately, almost magically in love and the white lie is soon removed from the record. But Wootliff shows us how this initial deceit creates a subtle, insidious imbalance deep in the relationship’s foundation.

Elena’s guilt for her fib leads her to second guess his reaction and magnify her own qualms about landing this younger guy with an older woman for a long-term partner. But Jake doesn’t objectify Elena this way and his romanticism, idealism and instinctive gallantry are all magnified by his concerns on the hardly yet spoken subject of Elena’s ticking biological clock. So they rush, without really thinking about it, into thoughts of what they need to do to have a family.

Costa and O’Connor give us such gentleness and intelligence. Just as in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) there is a rush of glorious sexiness and sexual pleasure at the very beginning and then something awe-inspiring and moving as Wootliff allows the audience to realise, at the same time as Elena and Jake, that things are serious. When Jake and Elena smiled at each other, I found myself smiling like an idiot as well. And it was the same story when they were suppressing tears.

Perhaps the shrewdest moment is the use of Elvis Costello’s song I Want You from the 1986 album Blood and Chocolate, the music of pain in love. It is what Jake selects to play when he comes back to Elena’s place that first time (as a part-time DJ, he takes it on himself to praise her record collection) and it is the music they fall in love to. This ominous song is the wicked witch that presents their newborn romance with the gift of disenchantment.

Only You is not without flaws. It is a bit overdone when somehow all the parties and social events attended by Jake and Elena are overrun by tiny babies and placidly beaming mums. But their love looks overwhelmingly real. These are people who, moment by moment, are making the secular-romantic equivalent of Pascal’s wager. They are betting on themselves and betting on love.

• Only You is released in the UK on 12 July.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by sweetest punch »

https://cine-vue.com/2019/07/film-review-only-you.html

Film Review: Only You
★★★☆☆

IVF remains a rarely discussed topic in cinema, even though millions of people go through it each year, which makes Harry Wootliff’s debut feature, Only You, all the more refreshing.

It all begins, as many romantic dramas do, with a meet-cute. One New Year’s Eve in Glasgow, Jake (Josh O’Connor) a part-time DJ and PhD student, and Elena (Laia Costa) a Spanish expat working at the city’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, end up sharing a cab home. It leads to a passionate one-night stand, where the couple make love to the on-the-nose choice of Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’. It’s the beginning of a whirlwind romance. They start dating, Jake (whose life fits in a suitcase) moves in and then they decide to try for a baby. It’s here that their troubles begin.

O’Connor and Costa make us believe whole-heartedly in their relationship. You never question their choices, we merely enjoy the emotion. Then Elena reveals that she’s nearly a decade older than Jake. “You’re going to want to fuck twenty-five-year-olds”, she says with more compassion than the line suggests. Jake doesn’t care, he’s in love. But Elena, older and wiser, knows that love can only carry them so far. As Elena predicted, hairline cracks begin to show in their relationship, and you start to wonder if their bond will stand the test of time.

Wootliff cannily turns familiar clichés on their head with startling insight. It’s not only refreshing that the film concerns an older woman and a younger man, but it’s also the way Wootliff handles things. O’Connor’s Jake, which his crisp middle-class accent is likeable, even if he’s a little petulant and fool-hardy. Costa, who has the harder task, brings a heart-wrenching depth to Elena’s feelings of failure and frustration. It’s a performance that bleeds with compassion for her dilemma.

It’s not just Wootliff’s characters that are refreshingly rendered. The backdrop of Glasgow, captured by Shabier Kirchner’s saffron-tinted cinematography, has never looked so beautiful. Of course there’s no rhyme or reason as to how a middle-class Brit and a Spanish woman have ended up there, but that really is by-the-by.

Wootliff’s script occasionally buckles under the psychological weight of the story, with one too many clichés sneaking through despite the originality of the concept (Jake calling Elena “Mrs Robinson” feels a little off).

Last year, Tamara Jenkin’s Private Life, starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti, charted similar territory, and admittedly did it with greater success. Nevertheless, Wootliff has crafted an emotionally rich debut which will leave you excited to see what comes next.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by sweetest punch »

Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/fi ... 88426.html

Only You review: An earthy romance that champions imperfection

Elvis Costello’s I Want You is one of the sexiest, most exquisitely masochistic laments ever written. Director Harry Wootliff (a woman) isn’t the first to use it in a film, but the song has never been deployed to more jolting effect. At various points, Costello groans: “Oh my baby baby, I love you more than you can tell.” The couple in the relationship drama Only You want to have a child. Oh baby, let the torture begin.
(...)
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/j ... rk-kermode

(...)
Musically, the piano and cello themes of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s sparse score are counterposed against an eclectic jukebox selection of tracks, most notably the anguished vocals of Elvis Costello’s I Want You – one of the most emotionally astute deployments of a pop song in a movie since Barry Jenkins’s killer use of Barbara Lewis’s Hello Stranger in Moonlight. As the title Only You ironically suggests, with love comes loneliness that can both create and fill a void. This film captures those competing elements perfectly. And I loved it.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Harry Lime
Posts: 152
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2007 6:55 pm
Location: West of the Hudson

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by Harry Lime »

sweetest punch wrote:https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/fi ... 88426.html

Only You review: An earthy romance that champions imperfection

Elvis Costello’s I Want You is one of the sexiest, most exquisitely masochistic laments ever written.
(...)
Gotta say, I think I Want You is a lot of things, but sexy ain't one of them.
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?
User avatar
verbal gymnastics
Posts: 13637
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2003 6:44 am
Location: Magic lantern land

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by verbal gymnastics »

I guess it depends on your preferences...
Who’s this kid with his mumbo jumbo?
Pars
Posts: 38
Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2013 1:00 pm

Re: ‘I Want You’ in movie ‘Only You’

Post by Pars »

Saw the film in Sheffield today with wife & two ( grown up ) kids. Thoroughly recommend it. “ I want you “ is deployed twice to very good effect and on the second occasion you get a decent view of the “ Blood & Chocolate “ LP. I almost let out a “whoop”.
Post Reply