Sorry If I Call You Love (2014)

Sorry If I Call You Love arrives from Spain in 2014, a romance adapted from Federico Moccia's 2007 novel, and it conducts itself with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in the conversations currently occupying the culture. Daniele Liotti plays an advertising executive, handsome and accomplished and weary of bachelorhood, who proposes to his girlfriend and is refused. Into this vacuum steps a younger woman, and the machinery of forbidden attraction begins its familiar hum. The camera lingers on Barcelona and Cadaques. The plot lingers on longing. Neither lingers on anything resembling a thesis.

The cast is uniformly Spanish, a fact of production and geography that carries no representative argument. Its lovers are heterosexual, its gaze is traditional, and its gender politics would have raised no eyebrows in 1994, let alone 2014. Wealth is not interrogated here. It is decoration. The executive's apartment, his car, his ease in the world are offered as attractive furniture, not as evidence in a case against capital. There is no reckoning with race, no environmental conscience, no interest in bodies that deviate from the cover of a magazine. Every character is neurotypical and none of them apologizes for it.

What the film does offer is a sermon-free evening. It has no lesson, no corrective, no moment where a character turns to the audience and explains how they ought to feel. Critics at the time found it slick and superficial, and that verdict holds up. For a certain kind of viewer, the absence of instruction is the appeal. For the rest of us, classification is a simple matter. A film like this does not push an agenda. It simply wants to be loved, and it is not.

THEMATIC TAGS: book_adaptation