Romantic movies told from the male point of view tend to focus on the guy, especially a guy able to recognise something in a woman – beauty, brains, talent – that she didn’t know she had. Through the guy’s actions the woman is able to get what she deserves, which includes a relationship with the guy because she owes all her success to him. A Star is Born is perhaps the most recent of this template, but it goes all the way back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his statue. The flipside of this template is action movies, which show the difficult lengths a guy’s got to go to otherwise in order to get the girl. Next Life is not an action movie, but a romantic story for men, with a small twist. Here we have two different good guys trying to sculpt Emilia Clarke. But this is not about a woman having two different opportunities for a happy life. Next Life is about one woman boxed in by men no matter what she does. It’s romantic in the same way a gilded cage is, and it’s disturbing that everyone involved thought this was sweet.
We begin with newly single Ivy (Ms. Clarke) catching a train from Waterloo station to stand godmother at a christening in the Cotswolds. In one version, thanks to a spilled cup of coffee, she meets jazz musician Diego (Edgar Ramírez) and one thing swiftly leads to another. In the other, no coffee is spilled, Diego and Ivy do not meet on the train, and when Ivy’s ex Noah (Jack Farthing) upstages the christening with a heartfelt speech regretting their breakup, a different one thing leads to another. In both timelines, Ivy allows her relationship to shape her career. With Diego she begins singing again and even starts working with Mercury Prize-winning jazz band Ezra Collective (playing themselves, though Ms. Clarke’s singing is good enough she doesn’t embarrass herself in their performances together). With Noah she goes back to working in his office, doing extremely well as a recruiter, and keeping their romance on the downlow. In both timelines she also moves into the mahoosive central London apartments her boyfriends own, places Ivy could never afford by herself. Noah has an enormous new-build apartment in Chelsea with a view of the river; Diego has an east London loft with a small recording studio and space for his children. Of course it’s giving Sliding Doors, but at least writer-director Drake Doremus (an American whose first marriage to an Englishwoman was the source material for his mediocre 2011 movie Like Crazy) has had the wit to ensure there’s a pregnancy in only one timeline.
But don’t get your hopes up for any self-determination. The choice Mr. Doremus is offering is between Diego and Noah’s visions of Ivy and not Ivy’s vision of herself. Ivy’s time is spent trying to win over Diego’s children and convincing everyone, including herself, that she’ll be a cool stepmother. (The fact that Diego speaks Spanish to his children and is an immigrant to the UK goes without comment, which is delightful and much more normal in real life than our movies let it be.) Or Ivy attends dinner parties as Noah’s ornament feeling self-conscious around these poshos that she is entirely reliant on her boyfriend for her living.
You can certainly see why men might think this is romantic. But the real issue in Next Life is that Ivy’s only choice for herself involves her relationship, with literally everything else about her life following in the wake of that decision. Noah’s corporate dullness leaves no space for Ivy’s musical talents, and Diego’s bohemian indifference to things like regular mealtimes or steady income means he just assumes Ivy will handle that for him. Once again we also have a movie in which the heroine has no one of her own to hang out with – a few comments in passing with the small goddaughter and the child’s mother ensure this passes the Bechdel test, but only barely – or indeed any separate life outside of her relationship. Say what you will about London romance Last Christmas – and you shouldn’t, it’s a banger – but its heroine (also played by Ms. Clarke)’s own messy life came first.
Here comes some generalizing from someone who literally wrote a book about dating life in London: right now, especially in the UK, men are not looking for a partner; they want someone to have power over. Women having things like ‘equal rights’ and ‘the ability to earn money’ means that we don’t need to have a husband in order to survive, and men resent this enormously. This means men approach relationships from the angle that a woman being dependent on a man means she loves him, and a man using that power responsibly means he loves her. So the ways Diego and Noah act towards Ivy – all based on their separate but identical belief that she would be nowhere without them – demonstrate how men can use their powers within a relationship, believing that to be love. And there are very good reasons why a smart and capable woman like Ivy would put herself under somebody’s thumb like this: a nice apartment, a baby, or even just being able to attend social gatherings without being marked as the spinster. If that’s the price she has to pay to be loved, plenty of women happily pay it.
It’s not a surprise that a male filmmaker is not interested in challenging this societal attitude. It’s not even a surprise that all the talented actors here would go along. Ms. Clarke’s gentle anxiety and enormous capacity for charm is perfect for characters like this, as her post-Game of Thrones résumé demonstrates, though there’s a refreshing edge to her that shows she knows exactly what she is doing. She is also a producer (not an executive producer) on this film, which means she’s also diversifying her career, which is only for the good. Mr. Ramírez gets to smoulder and noodle around on the guitar and demonstrate that stereotypes about musicians making bad boyfriends should be ignored, and Mr. Farthing brings a desperate sincerity that makes Noah’s wish to fix his past mistakes quite compelling. Within the limits of the concept, it’s only fair to say that it’s not a particularly easy choice.
Dan Romer’s music is an important throughline of mood and tone – music is unusually casually important here – and Marianne Bakke’s tight cinematography, mostly shot on location around the city, provides accurate emotional weather. The production design team led by Elizabeth Mary Moore also does a superb job getting London right; there’s very little to nitpick even among the smallest details. Yet the title represents Ivy’s jokey statement that perhaps she’ll only figure out how to live right in her next life. Maybe that’s when men will start thinking about women as equals. Maybe that’s when a man could love a woman who goes her own way instead of one who allows her wings to be clipped. For women Next Life serves as a warning. For men it tells a truth they don’t like to admit. For both sexes it’s an important document of how we live and love in the current moment.
Next Life recently played at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
You might also like…
