Love Affair

Movie Review: Love Affair

Year of Release: 1994
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Glenn Gordon Caron
Cast: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Katharine Hepburn

Plot outline: After meeting and falling in love, a couple plan a rendezvous three months later. When one of them is injured on the way to the meeting, the other waits without knowing what happened (IMDb).

Love Affair depends on grace and style to make its effect, and that's just as well, because most of the people seeing this movie are going to know how it turns out. If you haven't seen the original Love Affair (1939) with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, or the remake An Affair to Remember (1957) with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant, you must have seen Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which was about people who loved the earlier movies. No, there aren't going to be many people in the audience who don't know what's supposed to happen on May 8 on top of the Empire State Building. When Warren Beatty is pacing around up there, indeed, we almost expect him to be part of a crowd, with Boyer, Grant and Tom Hanks, all partners in misery. That's why it's kind of surprising that this second remake works as well as it does. What's interesting about the screenplay is that the movie's key turning point takes place, not between Beatty and Bening, but between Bening and legendary Katharine Hepburn. Sure, Bening likes the guy, but she distrusts him, and it's not until she sees the real Mike through the eyes of his aunt that she can take him seriously as a potential partner. Hepburn's scenes steal, and almost stop, the show. She has been old for a long time (she is in her 80s) but this is the first time she has also looked small and frail. Yet the magnificent spirit is still there, and the romantic fire, and she's right for this eccentric old woman, living alone in unimaginable splendour, and feeling an instant connection with the young woman her nephew has brought home. Part of the magic of the Hepburn scenes is set up by the location and the cinematography. There are scenes in the movie - including Beatty and Bening walking across a vast, lush green meadow - that are so radiant your jaw drops open. It's as if nature itself is a co-conspirator in the romance. Funny thing. This is one of the few Idiot Plots that works. Yes, there is a monumental and tragic misunderstanding between Mike and Terry. Yes, their happiness stands to be destroyed because both of them are pussy-footing around, and not saying what needs to be said. But the movie toys with that, and with us, in delicately written dialogue that allows them to say, and not say, everything that needs to be said, and needs not to be said. (RE)

My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars