What’s with this new love formula in the movies? In Saiyaara, the girl is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the boy devotes his life to looking after her. Sob!
Now in Netflix’s chic but vacuous My Oxford Year , two Oxonians(Oxy-morons?) fall for each other and …well, the rest is as predictable as Romeo and Juliet with lots of syrupy sentimentality, poetry , and retorts that seem as rehearsed as Akshay Kumar’s awards speeches.
You have to hand it to director Iain Morris and writers Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne for endorsing banality so meticulously , as though every line of poetry uttered by the lead pair (Mama Mia, they are tucked in the arms of academia) would make us care a bit more.
The meet-cute happens in a coffee shop in London where Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest) hides from one of his many ex-es. An excess of ex-es, so to speak triggers of a surfeit of brashness and arrogance which Sofia ( Anna De La Vega) at first finds annoying , then endearing, then irresistible… By the time we get to irresistible, the rich privileged Jamie begins to feel like a direct descendent of Ryan O’Neal in the 1969 tearjerker Love Story. There, it was the girl Jenny (Ali McGraw) who dies of cancer, here it is the boy. Same, Same.
In how many ways do we continue to celebrate morbidity on our movies? Why is the sacrificial streak so prominent in this season’s screen romances? Is this the movies’ way of telling us to think of love as a means to purify our souls?
I found nothing edifying , let alone purifying in My Oxford Year; not the idea of love as a means of salvation (it feels like con-job); not the love (which feels sanitized), not the main actors (who feel blow dried and mannequined).
A massive cake plays an important part of in the educational romance . It begins and ends the film. The cake is the most appetizing element in a movie that just doesn’t move. Maybe the treatment needed more of a push. The actors needed to more than just pretty and precocious. The characters feel too airy and dreary, as if they belong in a wispy animation film for children under the age of 10, or maybe 12, but definitely pre-pubescent.
