![]() Unexpectedly pregnant, Treena has returned home from college and now lives in the Clarks' crowded little house with her son. Lou has a sparring yet loving relationship with her brilliant sister, Treena. Patrick, her boyfriend and sure to eventually become Lou's husband, is a nice man, even though Lou simply tolerates his continual quest to become a perfect specimen of an athlete. ![]() Her family, ever teetering on financial disaster, is close. While Louisa’s fashion sense and bumblebee tights may be bold, the film, conversely, is not.Lou Clark enjoys her life in her small English hometown. The film thereby comes to resemble the wardrobe of protagonist Louisa: too ambitious, overpowering and in need of a touch-up. ![]() In an attempt to be quirky, the film takes topics like disability, euthanasia, and death and puts a childish stamp on them, meaning we fail to engage fully with characters and their emotional journeys. Ultimately, the controversy the film has gained reflects a lot about the film’s handling of disability. Every couple faces challenges and, in this moment, Will’s disability becomes secondary to the exploration of love under limitations. ![]() The couple is propelled across the fields by love and, for a fleeting moment, we get the impression that Will and Louisa are just like every other couple in love. He is not a disabled man at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding, but a man that is overcoming various emotional and physical battles.įrom the heart-breaking to the heart-warming, the scene then later shows a drunk Louisa sitting on Will’s lap who lustfully rolls them across the dance floor before racing out across the fields together in a drunken and love-filled euphoria. But what is most moving about the scene is that it is here that the film treats Will at his most human. During the service, the camera cuts to an image of Will, silently crying, trapped in his wheelchair. Interestingly, one of the film’s most moving scenes comes when Louisa and Will attend Will’s ex-girlfriend’s wedding, in which she is marrying one of Wills’ (former) best friends who she turned to after no longer being to cope with Will’s post-accident depression. It is this lack of personal intimacy that prevents the film from being totally engaging. However, at times she comes across as that working class girl who is too out there to be realistic, and too dim to not be frustrating. Her ditsy personality does offer some relief to the film’s darker moments, and Will’s birthday present to her of a pair of yellow and black stripe ‘bumblebee tights’ certainly brightens up the film in more ways than one. Louisa is pinned up as the common working class girl in juxtaposition to Will’s wealth. Their relationship lacks a final cementing that would allow audiences to fully invest in them.įurthermore, the film’s reliance on clichés to express characters’ emotional well-being means we are only given a superficial insight into characters they remain largely two-dimensional. The extent of Louisa and Will’s feelings for each other are only alluded to, and without any expression of their intense feelings for each other, the film feels oddly ungrounded. In the same way Will holds back from fully investing himself in Louisa, the film also feels like it’s holding back its full emotional impact. ![]() With a long term boyfriend already in hand (played by Mather Lewis, aka Neville Longbottom) who she increasingly comes to see as a symbol of the dullness of her life before the Traynors, Louisa has to choose between responsibility and love, between her past and her future. Traynor’s comment that Louisa is simply employed to ‘cheer him up’, Louisa later finds out that Will is set on undergoing a euthanasia procedure. Yet, despite their differences, a fruitful romance starts to blossom. With the Traynor family being rich enough to own the local castle, Louisa’s working class background makes her the ultimate juxtaposition to Will. After Will Traynor was made disabled after getting hit by a motorbike, Louisa Clarke is employed by his family to look after him. ![]()
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