Romantic fantasies are not exactly my favorite genre of film, but when they succeed, they have a good chance of being very enjoyable. I had quite a few expectations from ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey‘. I liked the title a lot first of all. I was attracted by the cinematic idea that I glimpsed when watching the trailer. I didn’t know the director Kogonada, but IMDB told me that he is a connoisseur of cinema and that he has made video essays about many of the directors for whom I have immense admiration. Finally, the lead roles are played by Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. The disappointment, however, was more or less in line with expectations.
‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey‘ starts as a romantic story. David and Sarah meet at the wedding of a mutual friend, a few hundred kilometers from the city where they live in different neighborhoods. They probably have good jobs and relatively comfortable lives, but the script intentionally doesn’t provide any information about anything other than their romantic aspirations or counter-aspirations. They’re around their 40s (he might be a little older, she might be a little younger) and they’re both single and pretty convinced, for different reasons, that they’ll never get married. From the second scene we can already guess what’s going to happen in their relationship, but how it happens is what matters. A torrential downpour breaks out and the two are forced to rent cars from a car rental company like no other, which may even have other business goals than just renting cars. The GPS device that the strange rental agents convince them to include in the rental works like a kind of ChatGPT from Stanley Kubrick’s time (the one with HAL 9000) and they will soon be guided to open doors to … I’ll stop here to avoid spoilers. I’ll just mention that from here we enter together with the heroes into a fantastic universe, where time is relative and nostalgia for the past overwhelms reality.
The source of inspiration for screenwriter Seth Reiss seems to have been the films written by Charlie Kaufman. However, the wealth of ideas, the multitude of cultural references and the poetic vein of the films written by Kaufman are missing. After we understand the motivations of the two’s reluctance to comit in the relationship, and this happens before half the screening time, the story slows down and there is no more significant development, all being reduced to the banal questions ‘when will they kiss?’ and ‘will they get back together before the end?’. There are many beautiful things along the way, for example Benjamin Loeb‘s cinematography (sometimes perhaps intentionally excessively sweet) and the presence of the two excellent actors Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, even if the chemistry between them doesn’t work perfectly on screen. Starting from an interesting idea, ‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey‘ manages to be only beautiful, but is also boring and leaves the impression of lasting too long.