I love it when you read to me
Now, the reason I sign on to check out streaming romantic comedies like Book of Love is not that I assume they will be any good at all. I consider myself to be more like a Gold Rush prospector, sitting on a muddy riverbank for hours waiting for a gold nugget to come up from the muck in my pan. The gold nugget can be a good movie or a bad movie. Either of those things are interesting and I like to talk about them. The only thing I cannot abide is a boring movie. Book of Love is fucking boring.
Book of Love follows the travails of British writer Henry Copper (Sam Claflin), the author of the tedious flop romance novel The Sensible Heart, in which it is made clear that he knows nothing about love or what might be interesting for a human being to read. When his book becomes a surprise hit in Mexico, his publisher Jen (Lucy Punch) sends him on a three-stop book tour of the country. He is accompanied by his book's translator, Maria Rodríguez (Verónica Echegui) and before too long it is revealed that she completely changed the text to make it a steamy, erotic novel. Will these two ever get along? Will he learn that passion is a key element in romance, and will she learn that she needs more than just passion alone to make a relationship work? That sure seems unlikely, doesn't it?
At the very least there is a glimmer of bad-good gold when it comes to the way the film presents the ludicrous clusterfuck of its book tour. Even though he is traveling with his translator, there is no plan in place for the interviews, which are conducted in Spanish, so the moment where she hops onstage with him to interpret is viewed - somehow - as a reckless bit of improvisation designed to save her skin when she thinks he might learn the truth about her textual changes. And don't even get me started on the groupies that chase Sam Claflin around like he's Shawn Mendes.
Where they travel and what they do when they get there becomes an increasingly byzantine thought experiment in discovering the farthest the film can get from believable human behavior. This will probably delight anyone who is a published author and can contrast this bizarre process with their own experiences.
Unfortunately, the proportion of published authors in the film's audience is probably not particularly statistically significant. But you wouldn't have to be a published author to appreciate the nail-biting uncanny horror of the second movement of the film, in which the pair are thrown together to write a follow-up novel and the movie clearly wants us to think a line about two people making love like "two dragons exploding in the flames of a volcano" is not only worth including, but the best part of the novel. Move over, Hemingway!
Tragically, the places where the film's badness gets interesting are few and far between. This is the first film I've seen that was filmed with a limited crew during the COVID-19 pandemic and feels like it for every aching second of the run time. At first it seems like the fact that they use the same four featured extras at every book event is a running gag, but once they hit their last stop in Palenque and those same extras are dressed up as indigenous people, it smacks you in the face that 1) this was not a joke, and 2) what the fuck?
Now, it's extremely common for movies like this to have plots made of mattress stuffing, but they usually live and die on the chemistry between the lead actors. Fortunately, whenever Claflin gets the chance to loosen up (ie. when he's playing drunk or horny) he has sparkling chemistry with Echegui. Unfortunately, those moments make up about 3% of the movie. For the rest of his performance, Claflin seems completely rudderless.
The character as written demands a buttoned-up, prim-and-proper Englishman to really sell how cartoonishly prudish he is. He needs to be clipped and awkward, and maybe have his monocle pop out whenever someone mentions a couple living together before marriage or whatever. Unfortunately, he has made the perplexing decision to play the role as a disaffected millennial wet blanket. This choice buries any potential the extremely wan comedy has of succeeding, at worst making it seem like this reasonably socially adjusted, allosexual man is genuinely furious that sex exists in the world. It's more frightening than funny in the allegedly farcical moments, and in between Claflin always defaults to an insipid blandness. Indeed, in his opening scene at a bookstore, he is upstaged by some prominently displayed novelizations of Anna and the Apocalypse.
I probably should have started worrying when the film opened on a Buzzfeed Studios production logo, to be fair. But regardless, seeing the film's brief sparks of worthiness so persistently buried under a heap of tedious nonsense is pure torture.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Book of Love follows the travails of British writer Henry Copper (Sam Claflin), the author of the tedious flop romance novel The Sensible Heart, in which it is made clear that he knows nothing about love or what might be interesting for a human being to read. When his book becomes a surprise hit in Mexico, his publisher Jen (Lucy Punch) sends him on a three-stop book tour of the country. He is accompanied by his book's translator, Maria Rodríguez (Verónica Echegui) and before too long it is revealed that she completely changed the text to make it a steamy, erotic novel. Will these two ever get along? Will he learn that passion is a key element in romance, and will she learn that she needs more than just passion alone to make a relationship work? That sure seems unlikely, doesn't it?
At the very least there is a glimmer of bad-good gold when it comes to the way the film presents the ludicrous clusterfuck of its book tour. Even though he is traveling with his translator, there is no plan in place for the interviews, which are conducted in Spanish, so the moment where she hops onstage with him to interpret is viewed - somehow - as a reckless bit of improvisation designed to save her skin when she thinks he might learn the truth about her textual changes. And don't even get me started on the groupies that chase Sam Claflin around like he's Shawn Mendes.
Where they travel and what they do when they get there becomes an increasingly byzantine thought experiment in discovering the farthest the film can get from believable human behavior. This will probably delight anyone who is a published author and can contrast this bizarre process with their own experiences.
Unfortunately, the proportion of published authors in the film's audience is probably not particularly statistically significant. But you wouldn't have to be a published author to appreciate the nail-biting uncanny horror of the second movement of the film, in which the pair are thrown together to write a follow-up novel and the movie clearly wants us to think a line about two people making love like "two dragons exploding in the flames of a volcano" is not only worth including, but the best part of the novel. Move over, Hemingway!
Tragically, the places where the film's badness gets interesting are few and far between. This is the first film I've seen that was filmed with a limited crew during the COVID-19 pandemic and feels like it for every aching second of the run time. At first it seems like the fact that they use the same four featured extras at every book event is a running gag, but once they hit their last stop in Palenque and those same extras are dressed up as indigenous people, it smacks you in the face that 1) this was not a joke, and 2) what the fuck?
Now, it's extremely common for movies like this to have plots made of mattress stuffing, but they usually live and die on the chemistry between the lead actors. Fortunately, whenever Claflin gets the chance to loosen up (ie. when he's playing drunk or horny) he has sparkling chemistry with Echegui. Unfortunately, those moments make up about 3% of the movie. For the rest of his performance, Claflin seems completely rudderless.
The character as written demands a buttoned-up, prim-and-proper Englishman to really sell how cartoonishly prudish he is. He needs to be clipped and awkward, and maybe have his monocle pop out whenever someone mentions a couple living together before marriage or whatever. Unfortunately, he has made the perplexing decision to play the role as a disaffected millennial wet blanket. This choice buries any potential the extremely wan comedy has of succeeding, at worst making it seem like this reasonably socially adjusted, allosexual man is genuinely furious that sex exists in the world. It's more frightening than funny in the allegedly farcical moments, and in between Claflin always defaults to an insipid blandness. Indeed, in his opening scene at a bookstore, he is upstaged by some prominently displayed novelizations of Anna and the Apocalypse.
I probably should have started worrying when the film opened on a Buzzfeed Studios production logo, to be fair. But regardless, seeing the film's brief sparks of worthiness so persistently buried under a heap of tedious nonsense is pure torture.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: romcoms
