When romantic comedy becomes a self-help manual

A great, daring and wonderful journey It's a grandiloquent title, but not all the adjectives it contains reflect the film's reality. Let's take it one step at a time: it's a €50 million production led by two stars like Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, so objectively we can define it as big; especially for a director, Kogonada, who until now had worked on a human scale. On the other hand, it's a romantic fantasy where the protagonists experience a date that literally plunges them into a journey through several crucial moments of their existence, trying to make peace with their past while they consider whether it's worth falling in love again. There's no doubt that in the current Hollywood franchise landscape, such a proposal is daring.

The problem is found in the leg of the wonder, a concept that falls on Kogonada like a slab of candy and forces him to abandon the geometric minimalism of his previous films, Columbus and Saying goodbye to Yang, to disguise himself without much conviction as Michel Gondry while his cinephile memory (it should not be forgotten that the filmmaker became known with video essays on film language) seeks to take refuge in explicit references to other titles in which the characters fabulously transit through various ages, Big and Hook. But if those had a youthful and family vocation, A great, daring and wonderful journey It is intended to be directed at an adult audience, although its vital reflection would fit into a self-help slogan printed on a coffee cup.