[ad_1]
In the fine tradition of great movie clashes like Armageddon vs Deep Impact, Olympus Has Fallen vs White House Down, No Strings Attached vs Friends with Benefits, we now have… Catherine Called Birdy vs Rosaline.
Released within a week of each other on duelling streaming platforms, both films are period comedies based on young adult novels with teenage heroines. Incidentally, both films also share the same cinematographer, Laurie Rose. I have no evidence to support this claim, but if you were to watch Catherine Called Birdy and Rosaline while squinting really hard, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.
Like Birdy in Lena Dunham’s moderately enjoyable Amazon Prime Video film, Rosaline in director Karen Maine’s retelling of Romeo & Juliet is a free-thinking young woman who revolts against her well-meaning but dinosaur-minded father when she’s told that she must get married to some one-toothed old man because that’s what women her age do. Rosaline is having none of it; she wants to marry for love. “Is there any other reason?” she asks her gay best friend, who deadpans, “Yes; money, status, land… nice living quarters.”
Played by a radiant Kaitlyn Dever, who was so good in Booksmart and Unbelievable, Rosaline, as you might have guessed already, is hardly the sort of well-mannered young lady you’d expect to see in a period film. Instead, she’s the most recent member of a fast-filling club founded by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, which hosts monthly brunches with Dakota Johnson (Persuasion), Mille Bobbie Brown (Enola Holmes) and Bella Ramsey (Catherine Called Birdy) in attendance.
The Fleabagification of modern cinema wouldn’t be complete without a contemporary soundtrack, which Rosaline also borrows from Dunham’s seminal series Girls. More mind-bendingly, Laurie Rose also shot the pilot of episode of Fleabag. It’s a Matroska doll of hat-tips and homages that ironically robs Rosaline of any originality, despite the great efforts that it appears to be putting into being edgy and contemporary. In many ways, however, Rosaline is a more lively film than Catherine Called Birdy. And most of it can be attributed to screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber — they’re the guys behind (500) Days of Summer, The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars.
Their stories are a soulful blend of youthful exuberance and the melancholy that can only come with old age. Barring director Ritesh Batra’s Our Souls at Night — in which they sort of flipped their usual narrative — Neustadter and Weber’s scripts are almost exclusively about idealistic characters whose lives are changed irrevocably by an enigmatic new presence.
In Rosaline, that presence is far more subdued; the titular heroine — described as ‘Romeo’s ex’ on the poster — is a more active protagonist than Tom Hansen in (500) Days of Summer, Aimee Finecky in The Spectacular Now, or Hazel Grace Lancaster in The Fault in Our Stars. Whether or not she succeeds in getting her spiralling life back on track is another matter.
Rosaline is heartbroken when Romeo falls for Juliet — her cousin — and goes on a mission to win him back with the help of a handsome young man who may or may not eventually become her love interest. It’s a classic rom-com set-up that Dever’s performance and Neustadter and Weber’s screenplay injects with just enough personality, despite the now-tired similarities to Fleabag. But despite the occasional charms, this hardly a memorable movie.
There is, however, a self-awareness to the narrative that goes a long way in explaining the many leaps of faith that the film requires you to take. Everybody, for instance, speaks in their native accent — like they did in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. And the supporting cast — especially Bradley Whitford and Minnie Driver — appears to having great fun. Rosaline isn’t a radical re-telling of Romeo & Juliet, but for its audience, it might be refreshing enough.
Rosaline
Director – Karen Maine
Cast – Kaitlyn Dever, Sean Teale, Isabela Merced, Kyle Allen, Bradley Whitford, Minnie Driver
Rating – 3.5/5
[ad_2]
Source link