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Love Actually
Movie
Love Actually
Director
Richard Curtis
Cast
Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Rowan Atkinson

By Subhash K Jha


Actually, there’s so much right and yummy about this multi-tiered plum cake of a romantic comedy that it would be better to say at the outset, what I didn’t like about it rather than what I did.

So here goes: Love Actually has too many characters swarming the svelte scenario, jostling one another and our attention as they shop, fight, love and ate each other in the Christmas season. Curtis’ clever mordant romance zips in and out of ruffled lives creating a waffled wonderment...

Oops, there I go! I’ve already run out of negative comments on Curtis’ cocky caustic and captivating movie debut. If you’ve seen what Curtis wrote in Four Weddings & A Funeral and Notting Hill you’d have an idea about what to expect here.

The absolutely endearing Hugh Grant, for one. I remember Grant blowing his top in an interview about not being able to dance properly in a sequence for this film. Well I beg to defer. Playing the British prime minister, obviously modelled on the rakish Tony Blair, Grant is in great shape breaking into a jog to the irresistible beats of the Pointer Sister when he falls in love with his maidservant(Martine McCutheon).

Far fetched? But why! Why can’t love strike in unlikely places? Why can’t people reach across impossible barriers? That’s the enchanting essence, the jestful gist of Curtis’s deeply disarming film.

Hence, a writer (Colin Firth) heads to rural France and falls heck-over-heels in love with his Portuguese maid(Lucia Moniz), heads back home to learn Portuguese and makes it just on time during Christmas to propose to her.

A solemn and mature 8-year old (played wonderfully by the solemn and mature Thomas Sangster) announces to his bemused and concerned lately widowed father (Liam Neeson) that he’s in love...A decadent jaded cynical but still passionate singer rediscovers chart-success and also that his faithful manager is the love of his life...two porno stars heaving and mock-moaning into each other on-camera discover love (I wish this little lust-into-love story had been left out – it takes away from the film’s all-encompassing audience-profile).

Every little story is a full script in itself. I’ve seen whole romantic comedies about the man (Alan Rickman) his wife (Emma Thompson) and the young woman who comes between them, or the newly married couple whose best friend discovers he loves the bride, or the young woman over-burdened with family responsibilities (Laura Linney) who can’t confess her love. Hers is the most poignant love story of the lot, somewhat marred by that jarring sequence where she finally falls into bed with her lover-boy, only to have her mentally ill brother call persistently on her cellphone.

Another strand in this stylishly layered romance that doesn’t work concerns a young horny London waiter who rushes to the US for some serious sex. The denouement of this search-for-gratification is absolutely deadend.

But then that’s only a minor failing in a film that drops a blessed blizzard of romantic yearnings on our hungry souls. Curtis’ film works—and how! — for many reasons, and none of them have to do with the script’s powers of manipulation.

The cast is first-rate particularly Grant, Billy Bob Thornton (as a seductive and raunchy Clinton-styled US president) and little Sanger. Emma Thompson ‘s breakdown scene when she discovers that the necklace in her husband’s pocket is for another woman, exhibits her range quite effectually.

It’s amazing how every actor in this jampacked tale finds an articulate space for selfassertion. Right on top of the hip-and-wow list of star-actors is Billy Nighy as the wry pop singer who gets up in the middle of a tv interview to flash his unmentionables in the anchor’s face.

Curtis balances such bawdy moments with the dewdrop tenderness of love’s little vignettes that form a wail-to-wail carpet in this cinema of silent anguish and deep affections. Parts of the film (for instance the porno stars discovering love) are outrageously unbelievable. But the incredulity supplements rather than diminishes the residue of charming naturalness.

While watching Love Actually weave a magical spell around our cynical hearts we can’t help wondering why love remains such a favourite scenestealer in our cinema although it threatens to join the dinosaurs in real life. This Christmas we’re doubly blessed. Love Actually comes during the same week as the healing touch provided by our own Munnabhai MBBS. Go for it.