168. Only You

Song - I Want You (Elvis Costello)

Movie: Only You (Harry Wootliff, 2018)

Elvis Costello's I Want You can be heard at two crucial moments in Only You and would be a fitting song for any Laia Costa film. Few contemporary actors understand as well how much you can communicate through "the way your shoulders shake and what they are shaking for." She uses her entire body, face and limbs to evoke her state of mind and is in almost constant movement throughout the film. And she is matched beat for beat here by Josh O'Connor, who conveys so much of his emotional state here through the way he moves his hands. They are very much helped by Harry Wootliff, who tries to put the actors' full bodies in the frame and to have the two actors together in the shot. Much of the film is about seeing Jake and Elena be loving, gentle, and caring to each other and see the other person respond to that behavior in kind. It's a wonderful approach that authentically and lovingly conveys the great physical and emotional attraction between the two lovers. 

I was glad to discover that Harry Wootliff's next film will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. She is clearly a good and sensitive director who knows very well what to do with her actors. All she needs is a better marketing department. Only You was presented and written about as a romantic drama about a couple who has trouble conceiving children and the challenges such an ordeal brings. It is certainly (also) about that, but it would have made all the money in the world if it had been marketed to millenials as the unabashedly romantic portrayal of a young financially independent, emotionally mature couple with a somewhat decent house (that they own!) and somewhat decent jobs. You could even see it as an anti-Brexit film that never bothers to explain why the Spanish Elena is living in Glasgow, and never sees her as an outsider/exception in society.  

Wootliff at times does let herself get bogged down by plot mechanisms and cannot avoid a too conventional third act where the heroes break up and then triumphantly get back together again. No film anymore needs a scene in which a parent explains that love isn't perfect, but is worth fighting for (or any variation of it), especially not one in which that idea is so perfectly conveyed by the relationship between its actors.