{"id":121326,"date":"2025-09-05T07:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T07:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121326\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T07:32:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T07:32:11","slug":"tiff-romance-is-cliched-and-sincere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121326\/","title":{"rendered":"TIFF Romance Is Cliched and Sincere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes, a romance feels so inevitable that no matter what either party does, the universe just keeps pushing them back together. Hollywood romances<\/a> are often built on a formula of \u201cGuy Gets Girl, Guy Loses Girl, Guy Gets Girl Back,\u201d but the love stories that shape us the most often require running through that cycle quite a few more times, with no guarantees of happy endings.<\/p>\n

The five-year romance between Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper (Emilia Jones<\/a>) is nothing if not cyclical. It began as a high school flirtation, with the two artsy misfits burning CDs of their favorite songs and leaving them in each other\u2019s lockers, content to let their favorite artists do the talking at an age when the prospect of socializing with people you like often feels like social suicide. They reconnect at a college party, initially feigning forgetfulness until a well-placed song on the aux cord makes it clear that their memories of each other were crystal clear. <\/p>\n

\"Mile<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

That sparks a romance that sees them move to New Orleans together as Harper pursues her culinary dreams, only to find that his lack of ambition and struggles with substance abuse are hurdles that their relationship isn\u2019t strong enough to handle. Years go by, and they each build their own separate lives until another spontaneous party encounter makes it clear that some feelings are harder to forget than your favorite song.<\/p>\n

That might sound like a spoiler-laden summary of an entire movie, but \u201cCharlie Harper<\/a>\u201d writer Tom Dean (who co-directs with Mac Eldridge) utilizes cyclical storytelling that gives you all of that information very early on. The film<\/a> alternates between the three \u201cfirst\u201d meetings between the doomed couple, who are utterly incapable of suppressing their mutual attraction \u2014 at least, the first three meetings, because there\u2019s every reason to believe it will happen again after the movie ends \u2014 cutting between the three legs of their relationship to illustrate that no amount of evolving external circumstances can change the fact that we love who we love.<\/p>\n

The chemistry between the two young lovers is undeniable, but the wedges that eventually drive them apart are present from the beginning. He\u2019s a quintessential \u201cI Can Fix Him\u201d project, handsome and self-destructive with pain behind his beautiful eyes and a taste for poetry and literature despite living in a trailer park with a history of depression and addiction in his family. She\u2019s an ambitious planner with dreams of being one of the best chefs in the world, with the work ethic to do it. They\u2019re drawn to each other because they both see that there\u2019s more to the world than the sad little town they grew up in (and, let\u2019s face it, because they\u2019re both hot), but her obsession with rising above her station was always going to clash with his seeming contentment to drink himself into an early grave.<\/p>\n

Dean and Eldridge know how to make a stylish film that manipulatively tugs on all the right emotional strings, and a few tears will probably be shed at the \u201cCharlie Harper\u201d premiere. It\u2019s not hard to imagine the film finding an audience among younger indie film fans who either don\u2019t remember movies like \u201c(500) Days of Summer\u201d or are simply eager to have one for their own generation. Those with a bit more viewing experience under their belts will probably grow bored of the film\u2019s dependence on cliches, as it often feels like a bittersweet mixtape of old indie tropes: the manipulative power of nostalgia, the ways that seemingly inconsequential pieces of physical media can become formative memories, the euphoric feeling of falling in love and fantasizing about the big world waiting for you outside your hometown, and the realizations that even if love wasn\u2019t enough, relationships can still shape us for the better.<\/p>\n

Some movies get richer the more time you sit with them, but \u201cCharlie Harper\u201d is the kind of film whose impact will always be the strongest as you\u2019re walking out of the theater. The lack of originality and occasional on-the-nose dialogue cancel out most of its rewatch value, but it\u2019s hard not to be affected in the moment by the sincerity of its storytelling and the chemistry between Robinson and Jones. There have been multitudes of movies made about the toxic young romances that shape us into the more stable adults we eventually become, but the world will stop making them when they stop making us feel things. And \u201cCharlie Harper\u201d is proof that that day has not arrived yet.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cCharlie Harper\u201d premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film reviews<\/a><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts? Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes, a romance feels so inevitable that no matter what either party does, the universe just keeps pushing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,67419,75,1554,337,209,15896],"class_list":["post-121326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-charlie-harper","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}