I mentioned in a previous post that I’d watched Le Déclin de L’Empire Américain (the one where basically eight people talk about sex) and was planning to watch the sequel Les Invasions Barbares. Which I did. A few minutes into it, I was thinking an actor looked very familiar—and it wasn’t one of the original cast, so I thought I must have seen him in something else. Then the plot took a familiar turn, too, and I realized I’d seen this movie already! Separately! Not realizing it was a sequel! Anyway, I’d liked it the first time and was glad to watch it again, and I liked it even better after seeing the first movie.

It’s a movie about a group of friends gathering around a friend who is dying, and also about the lengths the dying friend’s child goes to in order to make his dad comfortable. There’s a lot of good crying to be had. Plus, it’s fun to get updates on the other characters’ lives nearly 20 years later.

Then I watched The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I liked a lot. Funny and charming and also sad. I tried to watch it while eating lunch, but couldn’t: there’s so much visual stuff in a Wes Anderson movie, it’s like watching a movie with subtitles.

Then I watched Last Chance Harvey, which was on my “romance over 40” list. I always love Emma Thompson, but I didn’t like the movie. I’m going to discuss the plot here, so there will be spoilers, but I’m not sure there is anything actually spoilerish about them: the full story arc is clear from the beginning, just waiting for the details to be filled in. But if you’re planning to watch it, you can skip the rest of the post: I don’t say anything else after talking about the movie.

It started with me misunderstanding something. At the beginning of the movie, we’re being introduced to the two main characters: Emma Thompson’s Kate, and Dustin Hoffman’s Harvey. Kate comes into a house saying, “Hello, it’s your daughter!” and then we see Harvey playing his piano. So I thought Kate was Harvey’s daughter. The ages make sense: Emma Thompson was about 47, and Dustin Hoffman was about 70. BUT NO. NO, she is not his daughter: they are going to have a romance. We were just switching from “seeing Kate’s life” to “seeing Harvey’s life.”

Then, Harvey is a guy with problems. He can be charming, but it feels like a cover after we see how he behaves in several situations: he is not someone I would set up even with someone his age, such as Kate’s mother. When he gets Kate to talk to him in a bar, he’s aggressive in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. When she politely says no to his advances, he makes a sound that makes me want to hit him. He doesn’t listen to her saying no to him, and he persists. She says a polite and well-explained no to his suggestion that they have lunch together, so he sits at a table next to hers, orders lunch, and then says “See, we’re having lunch together”: he forces her to do what she said she did not want to do. He overshares about his life, in order to prove to her that his day was worse than hers (“You think YOUR day was bad?”), and never does ask her about why her day was bad. My instincts were going “Wheep, wheep, get out of there, Kate!,” but this was supposed to be them hitting it off. Then he follows her and won’t leave her alone; again, I was hearing sirens and seeing red lights, but we were supposed to be seeing successful romance beginning. I was seeing a desperate creepy guy trying to rebuild his self-esteem with a younger woman because he was feeling old and rejected and emasculated by other events in his life.

Soon he’s much less creepy and I started to accept some of the romance (at least they briefly REFERRED to the age difference instead of pretending it didn’t exist), but then his less-creepy self didn’t make sense with what we’d seen of him earlier. I still felt like he was a man invested in the chase: he MUST overcome her objections, he will pursue her like a salesman until he WINS, because THIS IS ALL HE HAS and he can’t suffer another crushing blow.

He buys her a dress, which had a certain element of potential charm but I felt like she should not have let him choose it or buy it for her. Not just because it was weird, but because it didn’t seem to fit with her character: she would buy her own dress, not stand there like a doll while a man dressed her and then took out his wallet. And it felt like it was filling a slot labeled “Romantic Movie Scene.”

Through all this, Emma Thompson is lovely, and I loved her and wanted a better guy for her. Dustin Hoffman ends up being appealing to a certain extent, too—but again, it doesn’t fit with what we saw of him earlier. It seems like his earlier conversation with his ex-wife about why they married/split (he was so fun / but then he became a complete jerk all the time) is the exact way it’s going to go with Kate, too.

Finally, I NEVER find it charming or romantic or pleasing in any way when people make promises they are absolutely unable to make. “I promise he’ll be okay.” “Everything will be fine, I promise.” “I promise this relationship will work.” Those are not promises people can make in almost any circumstance; when they DO make such promises in circumstances where they can’t make them, I find it weird and off-putting, and it lowers my opinion of their intelligence and/or character. After just a few days of knowing each other, Harvey promises Kate that their relationship will be successful. We’re supposed to see faith and love; what I see is a salesman closing a deal.