A British college student falls for an American student, only to be separated from him when she’s banned from the U.S. after overstaying her visa.
Director Drake Doremus attempts to chronicle the struggle of one young couple’s romance. The film asks the most simple of questions, can true love survive the road of life?
Anna (Felicity Jones) is a bright young writer in her last year of college in Los Angeles. Here she meets Jacob (Anton Yelchin), a young carpenter studying furniture design. Anna makes the first move, and the two find they have an instant, undeniable and passionate connection. The thought of separating forces Anna to makes a decision to ignore the mandates of her visa and instead spend a carefree summer with Jacob.
Earlier in the picture she had been warned by her parents about overstaying her student Visa. It seems that it was ran quickly by why she had to have a lawyer tell her the trouble she could get in by over staying the visa leading one to believe it must have happened before.
When Anna finally returns to London, it’s on the assumption that it will only be a brief absence. However the issue of visa violation hits her hard and Anna and Jacob soon find themselves in a nightmare of immigration laws and bureaucratic entanglements.
The battle spans several years as Anna and Jacob both grow and change and come together and drift apart only to struggle with the inescapable true love they felt for one another.
The chemistry between Jones and Yelchin is engaging to watch with close-ups showcasing the raw emotion of young love and expressions saying more than words. When you understand from the Q&A that all they had to work with was a treatment of some 50 pages it’s easy to see where this chemistry came from.
While the acting was great the fact that a director let his actors run with it was not. It resulted in a film that at times looked like they had no place to go. The jumps in time between one scene and another did not often transition well. Doremus and Jones more often than not were not successful in preserving the narrative or thematic through-lines they want the viewer to follow.
The end of the film leaves some viewers confused about the point of it all. Were they going to make a go of it or was it all over between the two of them?
The film was shot with a Canon DSLR and often looked like it as shot for far less than the $250,000 that Doremus claimed that it cost. It seems that the cinematographer was never told in film school that if you used a fixed focal length lens you don’t have the zoom problem that was so evident in the beginning of the film.
If you’re looking for a film of young love or to warn someone about visa problems, this would be the movie for you. Does it pass the test that we would pay to see the film in theatre, no! Would we take to time to see it on TV if it was on and once again the answer is no!