After the egregiously strident comedy of their last collaboration Life Happens, writer/director Kat Coiro and star Kate Bosworth re-team for an equally intolerable drama with And While We Were Here. With its every gesture both obvious but simplistic, Coiro’s tale concerns Bosworth and Iddo Goldberg’s married couple who travel to Italy so he can perform in an orchestral concert and she can finally begin work on a long-in-the-making book about her grandmother’s experiences in rural France during WWI and WWII. From the film’s opening frames, the director’s compositions visualize Bosworth and Goldberg’s silent detachment from each other with mannered bluntness. That sort of gracelessness extends to the interview recordings of her grandmother that Bosworth listens to via headphones, as each comment from the woman is so conveniently relevant to Bosworth’s current emotional situation that this recurring device soon comes across as parody.
