SYNOPSICS
This Year's Love (1999) is a English movie. David Kane has directed this movie. Kathy Burke,Jennifer Ehle,Ian Hart,Douglas Henshall are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1999. This Year's Love (1999) is considered one of the best Drama,Romance,Comedy movie in India and around the world.
The marriage of Danny and Hannah spectacularly crashes during the reception when the bride's best friend tells the groom that the bride is having an affair with her husband! The shock wave of chaos that spreads out from this one event touches the lives of a diverse group of the thirtysomethings that inhabit the Camden Town area of London. Hannah immediately leaves the reception and gets drunk and ends up in bed with the unwashed artist Cameron who shares a flat with a nerdy comic book enthusiast Liam, who in turn starts an ill-advised affair with society dropout single-mother Sophie. Danny meanwhile moves on and embarks on a relationship with a struggling singer Mary, whom he met at the airport on his way to his lonesome honeymoon. This partner-swapping merry-go-round continues for two years until a semblance of normality asserts itself and Danny and Hannah decide to drop everything and embark on their long delayed honeymoon.
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This Year's Love (1999) Reviews
Strangeley appealing serio-comedy
"This Year's Love" (18) - Warner Village Cinema, Inverness - 19 February 1999 Whatever it is, this film will never be classified as coming out of the Beatrice Potter School of Charm Cinema. It's rough and rude, immoral and bawdy, slap-stick and frightening and dispiriting. Yet I liked it! It certainly isn't the sort of film your vicar or grannie would want to be seen watching but I defy anyone to sit through the two hours of sexual relationships without laughing out loud in spite of themselves at the below-the-belt humour, wondering all the while if life is really like this in Camden Town. It's a film that lingers over such sights as tattooing and bed hopping, coke snorting and boozing and annual partner shuffling. It covers three years of the partnership permutations of six individuals. What they all have in common is a need for affection, a fantastic command of swear words, a terrible need to empty all booze glasses and fag packets, desire for self destruction, and a denial that there is any future to look forward to. There's no real plot. It's the sparks coming from the rubbing together of the fascinating dysfunctional characters that lights the tinder. We start off with Scotsman tattooist Douglas Henshall storming out of his wedding reception when he discovers that his wife of ten minutes, Scotswoman dress designer Catherine MacCormack, has been "practising" with his best man. He takes consolation in the arms of Heathrow Airport cleaner, Kathy Burke. We switch to Scotsman Dougray Scott, untalented artist with the paint brush, who makes a play for anything in skirts with "fine bone structure". In spite of his problems with personal hygiene - you can smell his hair from the first row in the balcony - he is the next to form a liaison with Kathy Burke. When Jennifer Ehle arrives on the scene it's as an upper class single mother with a permanent need for a bit of rough. She lives alone in a barge, wears Doc Martins and dreadlocks, disowns her posh background. We've heard that story too often for it to be original and this thread is a weak link in the chain of relationships. Nevertheless it serves to introduce the sixth shy nobody character, Ian Hart, who turns out to be the one who terrifies you out of your seat when he loses his control. There's a bit of lesbianism thrown in and the writer director, David Kane, reveals his roots and social leanings when he does a hatchet job on the upper crust at a cocktail party. He don't like 'em. That's fer sure, fer sure. I would hate to think that Camden Town as portrayed in this film represents the folk that live there, or anywhere in UK. Of course it doesn't any more than Coronation Street represents Manchester or Stendaz represents the east end of London. It's knowing that these warped and flawed characters are cartoons that makes the film acceptable. It's their dialogue and delivery that makes the film so enjoyable. And there's an added educational bonus. Your personal database of taboo words and base picturesque expressions will be expanded enormously. Even Channel 4 junkies will find novelties here. Let's say 8* out of 10. Maybe even 9. C U James
Finally, a London based romantic comedy that gets it right.
Words that fill me with dread: 'A Joel Schumacher Film' obviously, 'A Romatic Comedy from London', equally horrid. Yet finally someone has got it right - not Joel Schumacher of course. Peter Kane's salty comedy is something quite new, an unsentimental, contemporary La Ronde set in Camden Lock. His bone dry script is adorned by a magic cast, not least the indomitable Kathy Burke, who is surely now England's greatest treasure. There is a real courage here, no corners are cut and no easy, neat solutions are adopted. If we are a little disgusted by the smugness of the artsy characters it is more than compensated for by their terrible sadness. Very human, very witty and beamed in from a different galaxy from the one that Hugh Grant inhabits.
Funny, quirky Brit-flick
This Year's Love follows the (love) lives of 6 inhabitants of London's Camden area. The movie starts a bit like Four Weddings and A Funeral. Two people in bed wake up, lay there for a moment, then realise that they're late for a wedding. The only difference is that it's their wedding! After getting spliced, they go off to the reception. 35 minutes into wedded bliss, the groom Danny, is told by a guest that his new wife had sex with the best man. Danny confronts Hannah and blows his top before leaving. So begins two years of "swapping" between the 6 characters. Kathy Burke, veteran of comedy from her Harry Enfield days, plays the best character - Mary - a self proclaimed "fat bird" who is surprised at the attentions she gets from the 3 men. Hannah is played by the gorgeous Catherine McCormack, previously seen in Braveheart. In the second section of the film, two years on from the wedding, she is flatmate to Ian Hart's emotionally (and a bit mentally) unstable character. She meets, and is seduced by, Emily Woof (from The Full Monty). Ian Hart, thinking that he stands a chance with Hannah, tries to commit suicide when her walks in on the two girls in bed. The performances from the main cast are fine throughout and the film, whilst not being a laugh-a-minute comedy, certainly has its funny scenes. The nomadic Cameron meets his current girlfriend Sophie's rich parents and advises her father that he's not usually not too choosy about his women, in fact he'd "f*** a barber's floor". This Year's Love is a film that will not attain the heights of other recent Brit-flicks like The Full Monty and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but still deserves its place amongst the Top 10 of the last few years' best British Independent movies.
Painfully realistic movie, sometimes funny, often poignant
I first watched this movie in 1999 when I was 20. 10 years later it hasn't lost any of its relevance and stark reality that makes it one of the most enjoyable yet sadly poignant movies I have seen. This Year's Love never intended to be the RomCom its unfairly been categorised into. It is a take on modern life, modern love, the loneliness of living in London, the breakdown of relationships and the forming of new ones. It is not supposed to represent debauchery, instead seeking to demonstrate the trials and tribulations so many of us experience in our quest for happiness, acceptance and of course love. Don't we all crave love yet loathe it in equal measures?? I identify with this movie in too many ways to disclose on IMDb; I just believe this movie should be granted more credit and accolade than it has.
Here's another fine British film
Here's another fine British film, and I have to say it again, the film industry of this island is working fine! And this is exactly the sort of films European cinema in general does better than Hollywood, light comedies about ordinary people, realistic stories about realistic characters without the pretentious tears of the American melodramas. The story spreads over to years focusing on the love affairs of 3 women, Hannah (Catherine McCormack, the beautiful wife of Gibson in Braveheart (1995)), Mary (Kathy Burke, superb in Oldman's Nil by Mouth (1997), also in Elizabeth (1998)) and Sophie (the also beautiful Jennifer Ehle, seen in Wilde (1997)), and 3 men, Danny (Douglas Henshall), Cameron (Dougray Scott) and "I don't remember", who exchange lovers between them and are all linked in this strange way. The story seems to be triggered by the wedding in the starting sequence, but to me it is only the vehicle of introducing the characters. The setting is the Camden Town area of London and the time is today, so we get a glimpse of reality in the English capital. I have to reveal that the humouristic tour de force is the lager shower of Cameron in the pub. For all the sincere and unpretentious cinema a loving 6 out of 10.