There’s no denying the handsome, rose-tinted appeal of The Last Letter From Your Lover, indie filmmaker Augustine Frizzell’s take on Jojo Moyes’ bestselling novel. Every performer is charming enough; the design, as we swan around European rivieras in the 1960s and a particularly quaint version of present-day London, is warm and inviting. But all the good looks in the world aren’t enough to turn a stuffy script into a potent ode to time-defying romance.
The potential is there: Felicity Jones is at her most energetic as Ellie, finding a new lust for life as she stumbles across letters between Shaliene Woodley’s married socialite Jennifer and Callum Turner’s working-class journalist Anthony while researching another story at work. It’s a puzzle to piece together: who were these lonely souls? Why did their story end, seemingly, in tragedy? We flit back and forth between the 1960s and the present day in the first act, watching Ellie (and her charming, bumbling colleague Rory, winningly played by Nabhaan Rizwan) become immersed in a world of glamour and despair.
It overstays its welcome for another half hour for no good reason.
But then it shifts into a relay race, breathlessly handing over from one couple to the other once the mystery of Jennifer and Anthony’s affair is solved. What seemed like a perfect intrigue, full of suspense and dots to connect, overstays its welcome for another half hour for no good reason. Ellie relishes a new matchmaking opportunity in the present, but the spark, for the audience, has been extinguished. Woodley and Turner, the most compelling part of the film, are gone.
Occasionally, screenwriters Esta Spalding and Nick Payne — the playwright who masterfully combined love and quantum physics with the immensely popular and poignant stage show Constellations — offer sharp commentary on the evolution of seduction techniques (letter writing versus texting) across decades. But they give up on this too quickly, instead giving our modern-day lovers wincingly stiff dialogue — Ellie acknowledges a “smorgasbord of haphazard shagging”, and might be the only 20-something with a pulse to have ever said “holy moly” (three times, in fact). By plaguing the often elegant and tender moments of forbidden love with try-hard dialogue and illogical meet-cutes, everything that should make your heart sing just sounds out of tune.