Four Letters of Love, starring Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bonham Carter, is a saccharine story of affection and destiny

If the romance style lives and dies on chemistry, are you able to make a compelling movie about lovers earlier than they even meet?

In 1993, Nora Ephron decisively answered this query with Sleepless in Seattle, which performed coy as as to whether Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks’s characters would even meet till its ultimate scene — however spent its previous 90 minutes articulating the goals and needs of its incomplete, however completely interlocking halves.

Il Mare and its American remake, The Lake House, separated its characters not by distance however by years, constructing its epistolary romance round a time-twisting mailbox.

Four Letters of Love, an adaptation of Niall Williams’s novel of the identical title, is a magical realist story of far-flung lovers in Seventies Ireland whose lives coalesce across the mystical, intertwining forces of coincidence, tragedy, and divine intervention.

Two earth-shattering occasions set the parallel plots in movement. William (Pierce Brosnan), a civil servant, is seemingly despatched a divine order to go away his job and household to pursue an artist’s life, leaving his frail spouse (Imelda May) within the care of his son Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea, Dating Amber). Meanwhile, on a windy isle off Ireland’s west coast, a gifted musician, Sean (Dónal Finn), suffers a paralysing fall.

Sometime later, Sean’s sister Isabel (Ann Skelly, The Sandman) units off for the mainland to finish her training at a convent faculty, whereas Nicholas traces the steps of his wayward father within the wake of a tragedy.

As he heads west, he briefly crosses paths with Isabel on a bus — however nonetheless, they continue to be strangers, and proceed to go their separate methods.

For all his recklessness, William has been gifted with formidable inventive drive, which unlocks his son’s personal expertise for poetry after they reunite. Yet Nicholas stays a bystander in his personal story, pressured to deal with arbitrary tragedies reasonably than train his personal volition.

William’s seek for creative fulfilment extra intuitively aligns with Isabel’s rebellious streak, which drives her to neglect her training in favour of chasing after Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a roguish older boy.

Armed with a crooked smile (and, extra importantly, a automotive), Peader initially presents as a throwaway fling to stave off the boredom of convent faculty life. But when Isabel is kicked out of college, Peader unexpectedly finally ends up providing a house in addition to paid work at his household’s retailer.

Four Letters of Love isn’t a lot a love story as it’s a melodrama of destiny, and a awful one at that. There are solely so many deaths, miracles, and declarations of affection you possibly can throw into a movie earlier than it feels such as you’re gorging on treacle.

Still, there’s potential for compelling drama amid such chaos; for each incredulous plot contrivance that is explicitly handwaved as an act of God, it stays to be seen whether or not Nicholas and Isabel have the braveness to observe their very own hearts when their paths lastly collide — particularly when different romantic prospects stand in the best way.

There’s no irony in Williams’s laughably sensational (typically borderline offensive) twists, neither is there any depth of emotion. 

Even its solid of veteran actors, which extends to Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne as Isabel’s mother and father, can solely add a lot respectability.

The movie’s finest scenes hinge upon the connection between Isabel and her mom Margaret, who gently makes an attempt to coax her daughter out of her misguided life decisions, even when Bonham Carter is straddled with a hokey screenplay (“Falling in love — well that’s the easy part,” she sighs at one level).

Squandered, too, is the expansive fantastic thing about Ireland’s west coast beneath Polly Steele’s rote course. Emerald seas and cascading sand dunes are drained by a color palette of anaemic greys and browns, that drained visible hallmark of interval cinema.

It might solely take 4 letters to spell out love — however in the case of this movie, there’s one other phrase that strongly involves thoughts.

Four Letters of Love is in cinemas now.