Review: Love, Rosie

The shift from best friends to bedfellows has greased the engine of many a romantic comedy from When Harry Met Sally... to Friends With Benefits to the recent What If. Now comes Love, Rosie, an adaptation of Cecelia Ahern's bestselling romance Where Rainbows End, that tracks the trials and tribulations of destined couple Rosie and Alex.

Lifelong friends and neighbours, Rosie and Alex (Lily Collins and Sam Claflin) share a kiss on her 18th birthday, which she's too drunk to remember the next day. He believes she just wants to forget it ever happened, so he listens to her counsel when she encourages him to take popular girl Bethany (model Suki Waterhouse, who makes a good go of it) to the dance whilst Rosie partners up with star jock Greg (Christian Cooke). After a cringe-inducing episode with a runaway condom that has Alex bailing her out once more, the two friends plan to move to Boston where he's applied for a scholarship to Harvard to study medicine.

Circumstances thwart their plans. Rosie's minute-long encounter with Greg leaves her pregnant, a development she withholds from Alex, who learns about it a year later when he returns to his hometown for a weekend visit. Back in Boston, he becomes romantically entangled with long, tall Sally (Tamsin Egerton) whilst Rosie sludges away as a hotel housekeeper, wondering what happened to her dreams of owning a hotel and staring aghast as Bethany rockets to fame as a supermodel. Though there are near kisses and indirect declarations of love, Rosie and Alex keep missing their cues, biding time in doomed-from-the-start relationships and nourishing extended misunderstandings.

Love, Rosie is an exceedingly bright and polished movie with a predominantly peppy soundtrack and two winning leads in Collins and Claflin. The movie definitely needs their charm as Love, Rosie is devoid of any narrative heft or momentum. It's inevitable that the couple will be conjoined. Contrivances are to be expected, but the whole enterprise is a waiting game in which the diversions fail to divert. For all its romantic roundelays, there's no sense of substance to the partnerings. Sally is introduced only to be shown as a harridan several scenes later. Bethany reappears in Alex's life one minute only to be affianced to him the next. Both women are so one-dimensional that it's hard to fathom why Alex would have any emotional investment in either of them (the physical attraction is more understandable as both Egerton and Waterhouse are lissome beauties).

The same goes for Rosie's relationship with Greg, still as callow in his twenties as he was in his school days. At least there's a reason behind their reunion. As Rosie confesses to her sassy sidekick Ruby (Jaime Winstone), "I just want to belong to someone. I'm tired of waiting." Yet Greg is such an insufferable sod that surely she would be better off without him.

Credit to Collins and Claflin for making the goings-on digestible and, at times, worth the audience's tine. Collins, in particular, displays an intriguing depth beneath her porcelain exterior.

Love, Rosie

Directed by: Christian Ditter

Written by: Juliette Towhidi; adapted from Cecelia Ahern's novel, Where Rainbows End

Starring: Lily Collins, Sam Claflin, Jaime Winstone, Christian Cooke, Tamsin Egerton, Suki Waterhouse, Lorcan Cranitch