Film Review: The Book of Love
Images courtesy of StudioCanal.
A predictable rom-com that you should save yourself from watching.
The Book of Love follows an English writer, Henry Copper (Sam Claflin) whose book is translated into Spanish by translator Maria Rodriguez (Verónica Echegui), who completely rewrites his novel into an erotic romance.
The storyline follows the same love story we’ve seen a thousand times. I personally don’t mind a bit of predictability, but this film was one of the worst I’ve seen. It’s almost as if they had a structure of a story and forgot to fill in the buildup to each of the acts. There was absolutely no lead up in the main characters’ relationship, and definitely not enough story or character building for their relationship to make sense. The characters begin a blooming romance when they are asked to write a second novel - together. However due to the lack of build up, this is very hard to get emotionally invested in. They go from fighting and hating each other, to falling in love much too expeditiously and without much reason for either to be interested in the other - especially for Maria. Henry shows no redeemable qualities the entire time they spend together, it makes zero sense that she would fall for him.
Even the basis of the movie, that Maria completely rewrites Henry’s book, is ridiculous and unrealistic. Yes, movies can over-exaggerate storylines to create drama, but this can only be overlooked when the writing and acting is actually good.
The movie lacks character development and fails in creating a sense of relatability in any of the characters. The writing is lazy, and as such, has the unfortunate result of many holes in the storyline. The main character would even fail to appeal to a standard rom-com target audience wanting to see a dreamboat man: he is, at best, tacky and quite frankly boring. I think the movie wanted to go for the stereotypical, clueless, sexy British man - instead it delivers an unintelligent and dull attempt at one.
The movie frequently uses social media within the film screen. We see tweets on the screen and Instagram posts. However, this unfortunately adds to the tackiness of the film, giving the feeling of trying too hard to be relatable to the audience. This is common in so many modern movies and using social media in films can be very hard to do without making it corny. The Book of Love is no different.
The redeeming quality of this film was its ability to occasionally generate moments of genuine humour. Over the top characters with over the top punchlines made the film sometimes funny. However, these moments of comedy were so few and far between for it to count for much. I found myself laughing more at the unintentional corniness, that was definitely not supposed to be funny.
4/10
The Book of Love is screening in cinemas now.