Here’s the official synopsis from Netfix: “A pair of interwoven stories set in the present and past, ‘The Last Letter from Your Lover’ follows Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones), an ambitious journalist who discovers a trove of secret love letters from 1965 and becomes determined to solve the mystery of the forbidden affair at their center. Along with a big international ensemble, the film also spans time periods (the 1960s and the present day) and locations (London and the French Riviera). ![]() The film stars Shailene Woodley in her first major leading role since Drake Doremus’ 2019 “Endings, Beginnings” (also a romance), and she’s joined by Callum Turner, Academy Award nominee Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, and Nabhaan Rizwan. Frizzell succeeds with rare authority in making their liaison blazing hot while remaining steadfastly 12A.Actress turned filmmaker Augustine Frizzell makes her splashy Netflix feature debut with the upcoming romantic drama, “The Last Letter from Your Lover,” which is scheduled to drop on the streaming platform July 23. The colours pop in a gloriously saturated sequence of nightclub canoodling, and time stands still whenever Woodley and Turner are anywhere near each other. Woodley’s styling is pure Jackie Kennedy, complete with pillbox hats and long, sadly drooping lashes, but she does very well to etch so much of Jennifer’s stifled pain: she’s such a terrific actress, and this is right up there with her strongest work.Ī lively sheen is brought to the affair by director Augustine Frizzell, previously known for her girls’ stoner comedy Never Goin’ Back (2018). In fits and starts, their dalliance treats us to some of the most seductive images of beautiful people in that era, lounging around Europe with tragic glamour and falling in love, since The Talented Mr Ripley. box is born: she calls him Boot, after the out-of-his-depth hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. He’s composed it by hand and addressed it to Jennifer, but she makes him read it out loud, in a scene both actors play with just the right edge of embarrassing propriety. While the couple are mingling with the fashion set on the French Riviera, a journalist called Anthony O’Hare (Callum Turner) flies in to interview Lawrence, and after a bit of drunken rudeness, returns to their villa the next morning with a sweaty hangover and a classic Englishman’s apology. Even among friends, he talks over her with patronising aplomb and treats her as little more than a trinket. Her marriage with Lawrence (Joe Alwyn), a gregarious but cold industrialist, is an entirely formal arrangement with little genuine affection on either side. All the best stuff begins on the face of Shailene Woodley as Jennifer Stirling, a married, unhappy socialite in 1965, who is “J”, recipient of the letters and respondent to her mystery beau over several anxious, palpitating months. So far, so three stars – not that there’s anything particularly amiss with Jones or Rizwan (Informer, Industry), who have gawky but cute chemistry, and prove an appealing match by the end. In the process, she buddies up with their stiff custodian, Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan), who turns from her jobsworth nemesis into a cuddly fellow detective. ![]() Jones plays an unattached reporter for “The London Chronicle” who stumbles across the first of many billets-doux in the newspaper’s absurdly palatial archives. The script, by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding, toggles between the heartbreak of a will-they-won’t-they amour fou in the Sixties sections, and a relatively workaday framing story, the nagging banality of which only throws the lessons of the past into more dazzling relief. The Last Letter from Your Lover is all redemptive passion, second chances granted after half a lifetime, and radiates an earnest conviction that love can be transformative, whether it sets you free from a stiflingly conventional marriage or just loosens you up to feel something. I can’t argue that the film, derived from a 2008 Jojo Moyes bestseller, skirts the clichés of the format or in any way reinvents them, but it’s a thousand times better than the last Moyes adaptation to reach the screen, 2016’s disability-themed clunker Me Before You, which hinged on the gritted-teeth-emoji of an idea that life in a wheelchair was not worth living. You get a spectacularly well-dressed Sixties love affair playing out in intense, epistolary fashion, while Felicity Jones (as an improbable modern-day journalist) scurries around trying to make sense of it. ![]() ![]() If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer. Hardened cynics may be forced to scoff at The Last Letter from Your Lover, perhaps the most unabashedly tearjerking romance since The Notebook, rather than face confessing that it works unusually well.
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