Review: Comet

"You're horrible on paper [but] I loved you," Kimberly (Emmy Rossum) tells Dell (Justin Long) in one of the six different, specific time periods of their relationship depicted in writer-director Sam Esmail's romantic drama Comet.

"This is not a dream," Dell convinces himself at the start of the film, and the unreliability of these scenes - are they memories, dreams, fantasies, dreams about memories? - keeps the audience distracted from the non-linear charting of their six-year relationship. They meet whilst on queue to watch a meteor shower. He's just been on the phone dealing with news of his mother's cancer when he catches sight of her. She's out of his league, and on a date with a pretentious pretty boy, but Dell takes a chance and makes his play.

Comet proceeds to hopscotch back and forth - from a hotel room in Paris as they bicker to their first breakup, their reconciliation a year later on a train, their second parting conducted over the phone while he's in New York and she's in L.A., and their final encouter that could serve as closure or a new beginning. In each scenario, they remain the same - she's neurotic and in total control of their relationship, he's an unbearable chatterbox who believes they're doomed to fail.

Esmail and his crew suffuse the goings-on with a veneer of magical realism. From the pink and blue lights coating Rossum's face to the snow falling on the lovers as they embrace in their hotel room to the transitions between scenes, there's a whimsy that's both winning and melancholy. The off-kilter framing - Dell and Kimberly are constantly pushed to the side of the composition - heightens the sense of unreality and hint at a general imbalance.

Rossum and Long do very good work as they map the shifts in the couple's dynamic. Yet for all the film's inventiveness, there's a hollowness at its core that makes it difficult to empathise with or root for the couple. There's no sense of Dell and Kimberly as either individuals or a couple though Rossum and Long share a natural chemistry and do their utmost to sell the romance. The Parisian interlude, the best of the scenarios, could have been expanded into its own movie.

In many respects, Comet comes off as a time-jumping truncation of Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy, which focused on a couple at three different stages of their pairing. Linklater's Jesse and Celine's stream-of-consciousness dialogue was both an aphrodisiac and a balm. They talk to get to know each other, to reveal themselves and to escape from their realities, both individual and collective. Dell and Kimberly are never at a loss for words, but they talk at and around each other until potential insights become mere banalities.

Comet

Directed by: Sam Esmail

Written by: Sam Esmail

Starring: Justin Long, Emmy Rossum