Like Crazy review
Like Crazy was presented as Ineligible to compete at the sixth edition of Rome International Film Festival is the forth works of the promising and young American director Drake Doremus.
The autobiographic film, as the director said, dealing with the chance encounter between Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones). At the beginning of the film, Anna and Jacob attend a college: he was a young and talented designer of Los Angeles and she was a writer from London, hooked for the journalism. It will be Anna who will do the first step and decides to talk with Jacob, and it’s thanks to the first embarrassment and indecision that between the two started the love. They get on in a very absolute and complete way. When they are together everything seems perfect and possible. But the girl stays too much in the USA, and this, paradoxically, will be negative for their relationship. Suddenly, they change their way of lives: from an assiduous relation, when the moment of distance seems eternal, they have to communicate with short messages and no answered calling. They changed: Anna is now the editor of a London magazine, Jacob has success with is new job in L.A., and new people started to gain importance in their lives, as Jacob’s assistant Sam (Jennifer Lawrence), with whom he has a relation, and Anna‘s neighbor Simon (Charlie Bewley). But, every time that they move away the one from the other, there’s always something that bring them close again, something that they can’t avoid.
Written with a young point of view, as that of a 28 years old director from Los Angeles, the history follows their never forgetting love, thwarted by all kinds of events, first of all the Anna‘s bureaucratic problems. Instead to write the happiness and madness of a so strong love and follow the Hollywood tendency to deal with the story of “friends with benefits” without feelings, Doremus treated this relationship in his smallest, and intimate moments, in the worst and the best moments, not so useful to typify the entire film. To do so, the director has to dealing with the bad feelings that this relationship gave to the two lovers, love that drive them crazy or “like crazy” . This expression of feelings can be written just from a director who proved on his skin this kind of event.
Award winner for the jury of the last Sundance Film Festival the film was shoot with a manual camera, with an unexpected style, who gave to the actors the possibility to bare their complex feelings and to put up the relation and the natural chemistry that born from their working relationship. Treated from Universal it will get out on 2012 in Italy and we hope that it will have a right distribution, as it’s a film to see.
(Traduzione di Silvia Mariani)