Ma and Da: Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne in Four Letters of Love. Photo / Supplied
Ma and Da: Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne in Four Letters of Love. Photo / Supplied
Review by Sarah Watt
Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.
Four Letters of Love, directed by Polly Steele, is in cinemas now.
Two story threads take a devil of a long time to intertwine and even longer to elicit any emotion in this bloodless adaptation of bestselling Irish romance novel Four Letters of Love.
It’s 1971 in Dublin whenNicholas’s father (Pierce Brosnan) walks out of his job to pursue a new life as a painter.
Meanwhile, Ann Skelly’s fiery Isabel leaves her loving parents (Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne) for education, but is miserable until a knight in a red Triumph rescues her from the cold clutches of convent school.
But while it’s po-faced Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) and luminous Isabel who are supposedly fated to be together, inevitably the plucky lass must first fall in love with the wrong fellow, while sad Nick endures a series of family tragedies before embarking on an underexplained quest involving poetry and his father’s painting.
The pedestrian screenplay by the novel’s author, Niall Williams, includes the caricatures of mean Catholic nuns and a strong-willed, auburn-haired heroine, with lots of limp “I can’t explain it” lines from Brosnan’s useless, selfish vagabond artist. Williams attempts a poignant love story of tortured separation, but plot-wise it’s preposterous – not just the lacklustre moments of magical realism (no doubt more powerful on the printed page), but the complete lack of narrative set-up.
The book’s indulgence in mysticism fails on screen with cinematography that is far too TV-realistic; a lighter, mistier touch might have aided suspension of disbelief. Instead, soaring music (lovely but heavy-handed) does all the emotional heavy lifting against repeated shots of waves crashing on rocks.
Director Polly Steele (Let Me Go) squanders her strong cast: the Irish actors get to use their native accents, but it’s only Bonham Carter whose performance rises above the risible lines. The lovers are uneven: emotionless O’Shea was tonnes better as the closeted gay fella in Dating Amber, but Skelly is a vibrant delight as the free-spirited Isabel.
It may have been a touching, engrossing read, but if you have no attachment to the source material, the sentiments in these letters will fall on deaf ears.
