Critique 1 - I Love You Too - Inscris-toi gratuitement et surfe sans pub !
 FROM little things big things grow. One day in 2002, comedian Peter Helliar went to the Cinema Nova in Carlton to see Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing. Just before he went into the screening he realised he hadn’t locked his car. As he hurried back, his mind picked over what would be the worst thing to have stolen from the vehicle. Something personal, he decided, perhaps a love letter. Helliar can’t remember much about Leigh’s film but as he drove home, the idea of a purloined missive grew into an idea for a feature-film script. Eight years later and Helliar is reclining on a bed in a plush hotel room resting atop Melbourne’s skyline with his co-stars — Brendan Cowell, Yvonne Strahovski and Megan Gale — for a photo shoot with EG to mark the release of I Love You Too, the romantic comedy that very slowly grew out of his little idea. ‘‘I’ve always loved a blank piece of paper and a pen,’’ Helliar says soon after, as the movie’s principals are divided among various hotel suites to continue the film’s carefully choreographed promotion. ‘‘I always tell people to have as many ideas as you can: have a radio idea, have a sketch-comedy idea, have a film idea, have a television idea.’’ Although his latest television idea, a footy show for Channel Seven called The Bounce, has just been postponed, Helliar is excited that after eight years of work his screenplay, under the direction of television veteran Daina Reid, is about to be seen by the public. He’d avoided cashing in on his signature sketch character, inept Collingwood footballer Bryan Strauchan, because his filmmaking ambitions ran far deeper. ‘‘I could have done Strauchanie: the Movie, or something more comic, but I Love You Too wasn’t a lazy idea,’’ Helliar says. ‘‘It isn’t a funny premise; in fact, it’s a bit darker. But I could see particular scenes. I wanted to make something heartfelt and funny. Don’t write a funny premise with jokes added; write a real premise and then through situation and dialogue make it funny.’’ A romantic comedy that cuts back and forth between genial laughs and an examination of various relationships struggling to pull through — a couple, siblings, blokey best friends — I Love You Too revolves around Jim (Cowell), a likeable larrikin whose inability to commit to his English girlfriend Alice (Strahovski) after years together forces her to move on and him to take stock of his life, pulling away from his bumbling mate Blake (Helliar) and taking the counsel of a serene widower, Charlie (Peter Dinklage), in whose car a drunken Jim finds an unsent love letter. As with most people merely familiar with Helliar’s public persona, Strahovski was surprised when she got to page 20 of I Love You Too and found herself actually liking it. The 27-year-old Sydney-born actor has spent the past three years in Los Angeles, where she plays the female lead on the successful network television series Chuck, about a hardened CIA agent charged with babysitting a geek unexpectedly endowed with national secrets. The show is all banter and boom, so for her return to Australia she was keen for something different. ‘‘I liked that I got to play a girl, because I’ve spent the last three years being this super-spy,’’ Strahovski says. ‘‘It’s nice to be the girl that most girls are: someone who wants to meet a guy, fall in love and share a life.’’ Sitting opposite her, Cowell has a different relationship to the picture. A friend of Helliar’s, the actor and playwright had spent years talking about the story with him, including a drunken night out at a margarita bar in New York, but had never suggested himself for Jim because another Australian actor was attached to the part (‘‘It wasn’t Russell or Guy or Hugh,’’ Helliar says). When he did win the role following extensive auditions — Helliar had an epiphany about Cowell’s likeability while watching Seth Rogen in Kevin Smith’s gross-out comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno — Cowell also appreciated the challenge of attempting something different after dramas such as the cable series Love My Way and the 2007 dramatic feature Noise. ‘‘From what I’ve done I tend to go to the intense side of things, so this was my chance to go the other way,’’ says Cowell, whose other new release, the World WarI thriller Beneath Hill 60, finds him back in more familiar, dramatic surrounds. Making a contemporary romantic comedy was a new experience for both leads, as it is for the Australian film industry itself. It’s a hugely popular genre internationally that we’re reticent about attempting. ‘‘The Americans do it their way, the British do it their way — they’re culturally specific movies,’’ Reid says. ‘‘It had to be authentic to be Australian, authentic to all our experiences. So we’re not big talkers, for example, about our feelings, even in friendships. The characters couldn’t gush — no one would buy that.’’ Reid is a former actor who segued into directing, accumulating credits on everything from Skithouse (where she first met Helliar) to City Homicide. Prone to saying things such as ‘‘goodo’’ and ‘‘I married a man from Geelong’’ with a straight face, Reid knew how to channel the skills of those involved. She would tone Cowell down when his performance got too intense, while during the years of preparation she was one of the women, along with producers Laura Waters and Yael Bergman, who harried and challenged Helliar through countless drafts of his script. ‘‘The girls were very hard on me,’’ Helliar sighs, but he needed it. I Love You Too is ambitious in the scope of its various relationships and the story calls at one point for an intimate meeting of the souls between the 135-centimetre Dinklage (Elf, Death at a Funeral) and the Amazonian model Megan Gale as a lonely Italian catwalk queen, which if mishandled would be a long, dismal visual gag. ‘‘No one in Australia has seen me act. Most of the time people here have seen me as the face of a department store,’’ says Gale, who has the media skill of amiably pre-empting and amending lurking doubts. ‘‘I can understand why people think this isn’t a stretch but when they see the film they’ll know it’s not me playing Megan Gale, it’s a character from a different country, with a different culture, with a different set of problems.’’ Challenges abound for those involved. From the genre rules of a romantic comedy and the right tone of performance (many of the auditions Reid saw were better suited for Underbelly), to whether Helliar can match the screenplays he sees as forebears to the film: High Fidelity, Notting Hill, About a Boy. There’s also the small matter of attaining commercial success for what is aimed at a wide audience. ‘‘It’s a commercial movie, a good movie, and it’s what the audience has been asking for but I still don’t know how people will react,’’ Cowell says. Strahovski was sitting at Sydney Airport when she saw the I Love You Too trailer played back to back with one of the season’s biggest releases, Iron Man 2. ‘‘It looked like we belonged there,’’ she says. Helliar, however, is just happy that his idea has grown into a feature film, graciously accepting that even his favourite scene — Jim discussing life’s cruel outcomes with a barred customer at the miniature railway where he works — would have to be cut to improve the story’s flow. The first edit ran for 144 minutes; the released edit is 107minutes. ‘‘My films don’t run for 144 minutes,’’ Helliar says. ‘‘I’m not Judd Apatow yet.’’ I Love You Too is on general release from Thursday. |
