A BEAUTIFUL house situated perfectly on a idyllic lake in the Illinois countryside. Two people living there at different times two years apart strike up an unlikely friendship by correspondence. The movie has been variously described as beautiful, moving, a fantasy, a romantic comedy. There can be absolutely no doubt that it is beautifully filmed, but personally I found the concept of the two main characters living in different years and still able to communicate as though in the present oddly disturbing and unsatisfying. It seemed totally uncessary to be dragged between the two different periods against my will. I felt always somehow to be lagging behind what was actually happening, never quite able to catch up, never quite managing to make sense of it all.
The story is based on a South Korean film called Il Mare. As in almost all the roles she takes on Sandra Bullock plays, what I have come to call, her desperate and lonely female part. She is partnered for the first time since Speed (1994) with Keanu Reeves.
In 2004 Alex moves into the Lake House in rural Illinois originally designed by his architect father (Christopher Plummer) after Kate, a doctor, vacates it in 2006 to take up a hospital post in Chicago. She leaves a note for the new tenant asking him to kindly forward her mail. Alex hadn’t expected anyone to have been living in the house and with his curiosity aroused replies to Kate’s note. He also befriends the same dog which Kate had when she lived in the house two years earlier. Alex personally takes her mail to the address she gives him in Chicago. He finds himself standing in front of a building which is still under construction. It is then he realises their bizarre situation - they live in different times. It is all a bit twilight zone(ish).
Alex and Kate start to write, leaving letters for each other in the mailbox at the house. During the course of their correspondence it becomes clear that they are gradually falling in love even though they have never met. They are intrigued by the connection they feel and try to arrange to meet up, but unsurprisingly that doesn’t quite work out as they might have hoped. There are a couple more twists and turns in the plot, but these hardly add any real value or make the tale any more three dimentional.
I must admit I would comprehend the story better if the two periods were reversed, although the conclusion, when events come full circle, does at least leave the viewer with more of a sense of completeness than might have been expected half way through, As one review noted, it is ultimately a work of unfulfilled potential.
10/08/06
10/08/06
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