Thankfully, the film recovers fairly quickly after that, but the spectre of delicate fussiness is never very far from Only for You, which always teeters on a knife’s edge: between intriguing performances and sharp character observations being pulled from its musty story, or the story collapsing in on itself in a barrage of sometimes ill-conceived directorial flourishes. In particular, I could have done entirely without the fascistic over-reliance on cross-dissolves* and the recurrent motif of introducing conversations with giant close-ups on each of the participants before settling into a nice, normal series of medium length shot/reverse shots.
Then again, there are a few moments where Persico really seems to have a good handle on using the camera, particularly in a marvelously executed tracking shot back and forth through a restaurant that opens the film proper. She also brings in a few black-and-white sequences, signifying flashbacks, and while I suppose you might call that a typical thing to do, just because something is typical does not therefore mean that it cannot work well enough.
So, anyway, Only for You is a story about actors in love; specifically, it is about Dana (Shea Curry) and Jack (Michael Buie), two community theater performers who meet once upon a time, when Jack is busy being in a relationship, and sort of kind of fall for each other, although it tends to be the case that they’re not in love with each other at the exact same time. A little bit musty, right? Still, the two performers are committed to the roles and they’re both actual professionals with big Hollywood credits and not e.g. Donna Persico’s mother’s co-workers, or the other sorts of drab non-actors who tend to end up in indie fare. I’m always surprised just how big of a difference that makes: Only for You with mumbly amateurs would be viciously unbearable, but Only for You with SAG members is at least decent.
One thing is for certain: it’s pretty unusual to see an indie relationship film like this made from a woman’s perspective, even more unusual to see such a film made by an actual woman in the director’s chair, and that gives the movie a little bit of an added bite that pushes it a little beyond the glut of films that cover mostly the same ground, but with Dana’s role filled by a neurotic man-child musician. And in a field as crowded as this one, its tiny details like that which actually do make the difference between “this is crap” and “eh…this is okay”. Maybe Only for You tops out at “okay”, but that’s still something. If the directing weren’t so palpably over-thought, it might have even been “pretty good”.