CIFF 2009: Between Love & Goodbye Review-By Kelsey Zukowski

Starring: Simon Miller, Justin Tensen, Rob Harmon, Jane Elliot
Written & Directed By: Casper Andreas
Grade: C-

Between Love and Goodbye sporadically changes tone and the type of film it is. At times this is good since at first the direction it is going in seems like your typical romance. It’s a relief as things turn away from the ordinary, but it leads the film in to a self-destructive path where everyone seems to be out of character.

The film opens up on Marcel (Tensen) and Sarah (Elliot) getting married. We soon learn that Marcel’s true lover is the best man in the arrangement, Kyle (Miller). Marcel is from France and marries Sarah so he can stay in the country and be with Kyle. The apartment is under Marcel and Sarah’s name, but Kyle moves in with Marcel while Sarah gets a separate apartment nearby. The two of them get engaged to be married themselves and Marcel and Sarah still have to prove to immigration that they have a legitimate marriage. Marcel worries that they are not believable as a couple. After they get passed this though, Marcel learns that he has something much more harmful to worry about. Marcel encourages Kyle to forgive his sister, April (Harmon), for the major falling out they had. This soon proves to be something that Marcel regrets greatly. April moves in while she looks for a job and a place of her own. However, months later she is still there and has no job or money. She is living off of them and as she is clearly jealous of Marcel, she tries to keep her brother to herself. They formed a band, which becomes a bigger part of his life than Marcel is. As Marcel and April each fight against the other and for Kyle, things turn darker as their love dwindles.

There are a number of flashback sequences in the movie that show us how Marcel and Kyle met and what the beginning of their relationship was like. At the beginning of the movie the two act like they are completely in love. Both through this as well as when things turn bitter it gets us to question what things were like when things were better. However, even through the flashbacks we never really get to see how they fell in love and what brought them together. From what we see it is just a physical attraction that they claim is love just after a matter of days. Never believing that they were really in love makes it hard to really fight with them to keep their relationship alive.

The first half of the movie is enjoyable, but after a little while it gets really redundant. It reminds you that it is only following a formula and isn’t bringing anything new to the table. It is relying on the norms rather than even developing the characters much. The second part of the movie takes a different direction, which is refreshing at first, but ends up straying farther and farther away from logic. The characters suffer further as their actions don’t reflect on who they are at all. By the end, what happens isn’t as safe as what came before it, but it seems to be out of the blue and purely for shock factor. Especially the music in this moment seems really out of place and distracting.

As far as the lack of character development goes, Marcel is one of the weakest links. He is an actor and was a French foreign exchange student, but aside from that his entire identity is being hopelessly in love with Kyle. He really doesn’t have much of a personality which seems like it is the fault of both the writing by Casper Andreas and the acting by Justin Tensen. It is clear that there isn’t enough to have an understanding of Marcel, but Tensen wasn’t able to make us feel for him regardless of this either. He just doesn’t seem very real and doesn’t have many dimensions to him. Simon Miller brought a little bit more liveliness to Kyle, but the character actually seems like he goes backwards in growth rather than forward. Rob Harmon brings us the transsexual and very controlling sibling pretty well. At times the performance is one-sided, but the character is written this way. The way April slowly makes her mark and brings everything down with her forms a certain intensity, even if these are actions that anger us. Jane Elliot as Sarah seems to be the only one who brings forth any charm. Her character is really the only interesting one that we can care for. She’s in a good part of the movie, but her character isn’t the focus so she isn’t gone in to very deeply. If she would have been the protagonist and the writing was a bit more sharp, this could have been a much better film.