![]() You catch glimpses of it in between the busy, mechanical lurchings of the plot, in the swirling movement of a camera pan and the ardent commitment of the actors. You could say something similar about “The Last Letter From Your Lover,” even if that story never fully comes into focus. Amid longing looks, missed connections and atmospheric lashings of rain, the stage would appear to be set for a satisfyingly anguished drama of love and betrayal, the kind that the movies, to their detriment and the audience’s, rarely seems to invest in anymore. The clothes and scenery are gorgeous and so are they, and it’s only a matter of time before their respective miseries - he’s divorced and has a son he never sees, she’s trapped in a loveless marriage - drive them into each other’s arms. With her inattentive husband frequently called away on business (he’s a stranger to her even before the amnesia hits), Jennifer spends a lot of this summer holiday with Anthony on leisurely walks, sailing trips and top-down drives along the Riviera coast. Ours too, as the movie whisks us to a series of luscious extended flashbacks set in the South of France, where Jennifer and Larry are shown first crossing paths with a dashingly ill-mannered journalist, Anthony O’Hare (Callum Turner). But when Jennifer begins finding letters tucked in her old hiding spots, addressed to her by an unknown but passionate lover, some of her memories are triggered and her curiosity is awakened. Her husband, Larry (a frosty Joe Alwyn), clearly wants to keep things that way. It’s in the immediate aftermath of that accident that we meet Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley), a 1960s socialite who returns to her handsomely oppressive London home with a scar on her cheek and no recollection of recent events. ![]() (The movie is based on a novel by the English author and journalist Jojo Moyes.) There are movie allusions aplenty too: You needn’t look too hard to spot the echoes of “An Affair to Remember,” down to the fateful, near-fatal car crash that derails a lovers’ reunion. It begins with a quote from “A Farewell to Arms” and then, a short time later, finds two of its characters sparring over Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” The literary references, perfunctory and obvious though they may be, do their part to signal the kind of movie we’re watching: a forbidden romance set against the hustling-and-bustling world of the British press. Fittingly for a movie awash in lovely penmanship, “The Last Letter From Your Lover” announces its writerly trappings at the outset.
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