'In Search of a Midnight Kiss' is one of my all time favourite EIFF films, so I both couldn't wait for Alex Holdridge's follow up Meet Me in Montenegro and was worried it wouldn't live up to my excitement. Although it wasn't quite as good as 'Midnight Kiss', it was still a lovely film, much more personal but with the same simultaneously romantic and unromantic approach to relationships.
Holdridge and co-director Linnea Sassen (partners in real life and who wrote and star in the film too) have created something that feels like a firend telling you a story, a funny, sweet, sometimes happy, sometimes sad story about nothing much and about everything in the world. Part of this comes from the homemade feel, with freezes to sketches and drawings, shooting on lowish-tech digital and incorporating their own real-life holiday photos.
Holdridge and Sassen are engaging leads, Sassen the more charismatic and scene-stealing. Holdridge anchors the film with an open, honest performance. His character, Anderson, could easily have become annoying, but the film-makers don't let him wallow too much in self-pity and the self-deprecating voice over makes you root from him. Running alongside the central relationship is that of Anderson's friends Stephen and Friederike, seven years, rather than seven weeks into their relationship. Jennifer Ulrich as Friederike is smart and layered and Rupert Friend is unexpectedly hilarious as Stephen (the Homeland script writers might want to let him crack the occasional joke in the next season).
The film never gets too sentimental (and if it does stray there, it does so knowingly) and the film is as much a love letter to Berlin and Montenegro (both are virtual characters in the film) as it is to unexpected relationships.
The film was inspired by real life and it always feels authentic and truthful throughout, an honest look at romanticism and risking stability for something potentially more exciting.
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