Margaret Qualley leads the refreshingly grown-up romance Love Of Your Life
An enjoyable mature character study in a genre increasingly dominated by YA adaptations.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
One of the ironies of moviemaking is that a regular human life can seem too small to put onscreen. Living is the biggest thing any of us will ever do and yet it feels like a story about the ins and outs of everyday existence must be couched in some kind of premise or hook that can sell the story. To some degree, Rachel Morrison’s film Love Of Your Life has one. It’s a romance that explores what happens to fiercely independent nurse Maya (Margaret Qualley) after she meets-cute with adorably extroverted nerd Charlie (Gabriel Basso) when she’s 26 years old. Yet the heart of its story is anchored less in the rhythms of a romantic comedy or even a romantic drama than in the belief that the day-to-day realities of being a person are worthy of being immortalized.
With her gentle, small-scale sophomore feature, following the boxing drama The Fire Inside, Morrison is aiming for (if not quite hitting the highs of) the observational humanism that colors something like Celine Song’s Past Lives or Kelly Reichardt’s entire filmography. Several wrenching and dramatic things happen as Maya ages into her late 20s and early 30s, but Morrison presents them less as the beats of a classic melodrama and more as punctuation marks within a life that extends far beyond the logline you would use to sum it up. That makes Love Of Your Life hard to describe without spoiling it. It touches on topics ranging from marriage and family to grief and the impulse to escape reality. Yet the pleasure (and the tension) of watching it is the question of where Maya’s life will take her next—a path that’s predictable in its big beats but surprising in its small ones, anchored by Qualley’s luminously watchable screen presence.
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