A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Director: Kogonada
Cert: 15A
Genre: Romance
Starring: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Running Time: 1 hr 50 mins
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey arrives trailing arch gestures and quotation marks: emotional, visual, cinematic, the works. Kogonada’s metatextual meet-cute is fully aware it is less a love story than a story about love stories. Or maybe a story about that.
Kogonada began his career as a meticulous visual essayist, dissecting cinema’s architecture, then evolved into a film-maker whose works transpose that analytic eye into compositions of space, memory and emotion.
His eye for exquisite composition remains unparalleled: crane shots transform urban alleyways into magical places; raindrops bounce off puddles. No film since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg has made such lyrical use of brollies. For all this beauty, the journey itself is strangely inert.
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell play Sarah and David, improbably radiant singles nudged into an allegorical road trip by a wacky, metaphorical car-rental agency headed by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. These overly quirky entities saddle David with a car equipped with thunderingly symbolic GPS commentary.
The road trip takes David and Sarah through portals to their pasts: a high school where David once played an unrequited leading man; a gallery adored by Sarah’s late mother; even a lighthouse where epiphany stubbornly refused to arrive. Each stop is lavishly designed, drenched in nostalgia and CG, but the journey metaphor quickly runs out of petrol.
Seth Reiss’s script, which uses the portal device to leap around significant events such as births and deaths, yields zaniness, undeveloped characters and unearned codas. It feels like cheating. Instead of unfolding naturally, the film hammers its ideas into place, resulting in a wearyingly overengineered experience.
Dialogue leans heavily on therapyspeak – “Thank you for sharing that with me” – and risk-averse intimacy. Scenes flirt with surrealism but lack the anarchic energy of Everything Everywhere All at Once. The whimsy is tasteful, meditative and static.
This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse. Robbie tempers her radiance with wounded caution; Farrell, nursing the hapless melancholy of his Yorgos Lanthimos collaborations, grounds the film’s more fanciful turns. But this journey goes nowhere slowly.
In cinemas from Friday, September 19th