“Love of Your Life” is a thoughtful, quietly devastating film about what happens when you get the thing everyone wants I life, and then have it ripped away.
Maya (Margaret Qualley) is a twentysomething Boston nurse whose sweet romance with Charlie (Gabriel Basso) quickly becomes a marriage. But when tragedy strikes, Maya responds by doing something extreme: she runs. She cuts herself off from her old life, alienates her mother-in-law (Catherine Keener), leaves her best friend (Patrick Schwarzenegger) behind, and becomes a digital nomad in Portugal. She eventually meets Felix (Aaron Pierre), who gives her a reason to believe she might be capable of intimacy again. This leads her to England and another possible beginning.
What makes the film interesting is that Maya isn’t really traveling to find herself, but she’s running from the person she became after Charlie’s death. She blames herself, and the pain of losing him makes human connection feel dangerous. So she keeps moving. Pain turns into avoidance, avoidance into shame, and shame pushes her even farther away from the people who love her.
There’s a lovely idea at the center of the film about how people talk about finding the love of your life as though there can only be one. But what if there’s more than one? What if losing someone doesn’t mean the rest of your life has to become a monument to that loss?
Rachel Morrison directs with an understated, authentic touch, and Julia Cox’s writing is the real strength. The story itself didn’t completely win me over (nor did the fact that the film moves at a very slow pace), but the dialogue is eloquent and genuinely poignant. Maya’s imagined version of the life she might have had with Charlie is especially painful because the tragedy isn’t only that he died, but that an entire future disappeared with him.
Qualley is perfectly cast, playing Maya with restraint and letting the character’s sadness sit beneath the surface rather than constantly announcing itself. There’s something very believable about her emotional distance, even when the movie around her occasionally feels a little too polished.
I didn’t love “Love of Your Life,” but I admired the care behind it. It’s a beautiful looking, deeply sad film with writing that understands grief as something more complicated than simply missing someone. Sometimes grief is the life you imagine you could have had, and the fear that moving forward means leaving that life behind.
By: Louisa Moore
