Love, Rosie

Dir: Christian Ditter

2014

*

Based on the novel Where Rainbows End, Love, Rosie represents the second film adaptation of one of Irish Author Cecelia Ahern's books. Richard LaGravenese's 2007 adaption of P.S. I love You was sickly sweet but not without merit but Christian Ditter's 2014 adaptation with changed title is the sort of thing that makes me want to rip out my own eyeballs. It takes place in a sort of nondescript England land where the characters are clearly rich and yet live like they're working class. This is the first of many aspect of life that Love, Rosie gets deliriously wrong. The film follows the relationship between childhood friends Alex and Rosie. They clearly love each other but fail to get it together throughout their twenties and early thirties, or at least I think that's how old they are supposed to be, it is never made clear, neither character looking a day older than Rosie's 18th birthday scene. I'm not a fan of bad age prosthetics but when neither character develops at all, it is impossible to work out how much time has passed throughout the film. 2011's One Day works in very much the same way, in Where Rainbows End's defence One day was written five years later but it is still an improved take on the idea. By the end of the film I couldn't have cared less about whether the two characters finally got it together or not, half of me wanted them to die horrible and deserving deaths but then I realised that each of them probably deserved to be with each other instead, which would be far worse, although I wouldn't want to watch it, unlike their slow and painful deaths. I don't think I'm out of line by suggesting the book/film/story was intended for and has been embraced by younger women, so I was quite shocked to see how poorly women are represented within the story. Every female character featured is a slave to a male character, unable to full function without male authority, waiting for one to dominate them and able to manipulate on a simple whim. It's incredibly insulting. It's like Fifty Shades of Grey but without all the spanking. The sex comedy featured is vomit-inducing rather than funny. It's woefully unreal and disturbing in that it suggests to young women that it is both common and normal. To say each character and each performance is cardboard is an insult to cardboard. Cardboard serves a purpose and is generally quite useful. The character and story development is awful, the fact Ahern was in her early twenties when she wrote is explains a lot in terms of life experience and lack of in the story but surely they could have rectified this in the film that came out a whole decade later? I'm afraid I don't have that much respect for a female author who seems to embrace the term 'Chick lit', everything about the story/film is dire and does nothing for the empowerment of women, quite the opposite in fact which in turn is also insulting to men. No one escape the awfulness this film promotes. And it's got Jamie Winstone in it who doesn't change her hair style in over ten years (she has red hair and drives a VW Beatle because she’s the ‘funky’ friend). Rubbish, nonsense and utterly hateful with absolutely no redeeming features.