Forget Me Not Review

• 4th May 2011

If I missed the last tube from Farringdon and needed to get to a party on the Southbank, I’d jump on the N63 bus. Not Eve though. No, Eve decides to walk, taking an extravagantly non-direct route and dragging a sullen, morose stranger along with her. She does find love though, which never really happens on the N63. Perhaps that’s why I’m still single.

Billed as a kind of 24-hour love story and a love song to London, Forget Me Not manages spectacularly to be neither. It starts promisingly, with some interesting point-of-view shots and a starkly bleak depiction of a man contemplating suicide, but then quickly descends into the type of twaddle teen daydreams are made of.

Take Wuthering Heights and remove the moors, historical setting, gothic drama, intense passion and dark bitterness, et voilà, you have Forget Me Not. Bright, sassy Eve meets dark, brooding Will and the two engage in 90 minutes of cringe-inducing dialogue as they share their thoughts and dreams, have the occasional tiff, ride the London Eye and fall in love. Then, strangely, they pay a visit to Eve’s nan.

“We are now entering the bubble of truth,” says Eve as the sun comes up. Honestly. Tobias Menzies and Genevieve O’Reilly do their best as Will and Eve, but there’s really only so much an actor can do with lines like these. The few minutes that feel remotely credible in this film are in the love scene – probably because two shut up for a bit.

And as far as love songs to cities goes, this is a pretty superficial kind of love. This film’s nicely shot, but very much from a tourist’s-eye view. This isn’t loving London as she mooches about the house in track pants stuffing her face with cold pizza. Forget Me Not only loves London’s pretty, nicely dressed bits.

It’s a nice idea – capturing that wonderful sort of night when two people meet and end up talking the whole night through. But the filmmakers seem to have lost faith during the execution of it, feeling the need to explain too much through painfully self-consciousness dialogue, to perform plot gymnastics to reveal Will’s (unnecessary) dark secret, and to sell London with tourist-brochure cinematography.

The thing is people with all their muddles and cities with their seedy sides are fascinating. A film that believed that might have been something rather poignant and compelling. But Forget Me Not did not, and was not.

Kathy Alys