Love Me If You Dare
What starts out as an emptyheaded but amusing Amelie riff, with the magical realism, swooping camerawork, green and brown filtered into every shot, quickly turns maddeningly banal as soon as the characters become adults. Suddenly, it becomes an invisible obstacle romance, where they create things between them and other characters (like the guy’s father) act entirely irrationally so as to create the sense that they are fighting against the world, as opposed to the fact that they are just, stupid. The dialogue, while passable at first, turns incomprehensible, a dinner scene has the lead asking to have “just head-on dialectic on the state of the heart.” Fantasy sequences are merely distractions and confused (there’s a scene where we see some character being hung from a lamppost, but we don’t know who it is or why they are there, and the movie forgets about it) and the ending not only cheats but is afraid of actually resolving.
