Me Before You (2016)
Directed by Thea Sharrock
Lou Clark, a directionless 26-year-old from the English countryside, takes a job at the local castle as a caregiver and companion to a wealthy young banker, Will Traynor. Wheelchair-bound from an accident two years prior, the once adventurous Will has all but given up — that is until Lou determines to show him that life is worth living.
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What critics say influenced Me Before You
Sin ir más lejos, en un clásico del género como Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), un ejecutivo encontraba en una prostituta de vulgares modales un aliciente para su aburrida vida, o, en Cincuenta sombras de Grey, el atormentado millonario Christian comenzaba a arrancar la coraza de su corazón y a saltarse unas (auto)impuestas normas que le prohibían relacionarse con las mujeres de otro modo que no sea a través del sadomasoquismo, una vez que se cruza en su camino la estudiante Anastasia y cae rendido ante su candidez.
A caballo entre Intocable o Bajo la misma estrella y Pretty Woman (con vestido rojo incluido), es una historia de amor entre una joven feliz de clase baja y un chico rico y amargado desde que se quedo?
Decades after “Pretty Woman,” Moyes has doubled-down on a cliche, even as she’s watered down the “sex for hire” come-on.
And, of course, one of them (see “Fifty Shades of Gray,” “Pretty Woman,” et.al.) must be stinking rich so our would-be lovers can coo in the lavish backdrop of private planes, exotic holidays and castles – yes, castles plural.
Enter Lou as Will’s latest caregiver, and here come the plot references to “My Fair Lady,” “Educating Rita,” “The Bucket List,” “Pretty Woman” (Lou even wears a red dress to a musical performance, ala Julia Roberts) and even “Dying Young” (in which Ms. Roberts played a caregiver to a wealthy patient played by Campbell Scott).
To be fair, there of echoes of many other more edifying sources—“An Affair to Remember,” “ Pretty Woman ,” the French import “ The Intouchables ”—that reverberate through this “ Beauty and the Beast ” fantasy as it unfolds in a quaint English village.
Enter Lou as Will’s latest caregiver, and here come the plot references to “My Fair Lady,” “Educating Rita,” “The Bucket List,” “Pretty Woman” (Lou even wears a red dress to a musical performance, ala Julia Roberts) and even “Dying Young” (in which Ms. Roberts played a caregiver to a wealthy patient played by Campbell Scott).
This story of the relationship between a quadriplegic man and his caregiver is hardly the unvarnished version — it’s got less in common with “The Sea Inside” than with Julia Roberts’s “Dying Young.”
If the plot of Me Before You sounds familiar, it is: A 2011 French film, The Intouchables, was about a wealthy playboy who, after an accident leaves him a bitter quadriplegic, hires a poor but upbeat young man from the projects as his constant companion.
The set-up is oddly reminiscent of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s “The Intouchables,” except that the relationship it focuses on is between a man and a woman rather than two guys.
To be fair, there of echoes of many other more edifying sources—“An Affair to Remember,” “ Pretty Woman ,” the French import “ The Intouchables ”—that reverberate through this “ Beauty and the Beast ” fantasy as it unfolds in a quaint English village.
Imagine “The Intouchables” with more romance and less chemistry, crossbred with a far tamer version of “Pretty Woman” so lacking in eroticism that its PG-13 rating seems unduly harsh, and you’re halfway toward picturing Thea Sharrock ’s “ Me Before You .”
Parte The Faul in Our Stars, parte Pretty Woman y parte The Intouchables (de Francia), Me Before You trae a la mesa ingredientes de multiples filmes que vinieron antes de ella.
Others (“Whose Life Is It Anyway?”) are built on characters and performances of such intense brio that we question the decision, even as we understand what a circumscribed life would mean to such a person.
The story belongs to Clarke and Claflin, and it plays like "Pretty Woman" one scene, "Whose Life is It Anyway?" the next.
“Me Before You” has echoes of everything from “Jane Eyre” to “Whose Life Is it Anyway?”
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The script is out of balance, wandering off into “Educating Rita” territory as Lou is exposed to things only the truly rich (and class conscious) typically experience.
Enter Lou as Will’s latest caregiver, and here come the plot references to “My Fair Lady,” “Educating Rita,” “The Bucket List,” “Pretty Woman” (Lou even wears a red dress to a musical performance, ala Julia Roberts) and even “Dying Young” (in which Ms. Roberts played a caregiver to a wealthy patient played by Campbell Scott).
To be fair, there of echoes of many other more edifying sources—“An Affair to Remember,” “ Pretty Woman ,” the French import “ The Intouchables ”—that reverberate through this “ Beauty and the Beast ” fantasy as it unfolds in a quaint English village.
Watching An Affair to Remember or Brian’s Song?
Louisa and Will are older than the teen couples in The Fault in Our Stars and If I Stay — she’s in her mid-twenties, and he’s in his early thirties — but the film is very much a continuation of the recent resurgence in teary romances, in which hearts are more stalwart than the bodies in which they reside, and love collides with mortality so hard that whole forests’ worth of tissue aren’t enough to dry the audience’s eyes.
Like the (better) 2014 tearjerker "The Fault in Our Stars," this film version, directed by Thea Sharrock, probably is a slam dunk for the book's fans, who will likely be crying from the first scene.
Moyes adapts her own work, which probably helps, but the tragic romance doesn’t produce those wracking sobs like The Fault in Our Stars did or have enough off-beat humor like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
This, too, is the kind of medical misfortune that movies like to throw at young lovers, whether it’s cancer in “The Fault in Our Stars” or the vaguely defined illness in “Love Story.”
But weep porn does what weep porn must, even though—unlike my excessive waterworks during "The Fault in Our Stars"—I found no need to dip into the promo Kleenex handed out at my screening.
To fans of John Green's The Fault In Our Stars, Me Before You might seem like a more grown-up version of the same story, thanks to its similar themes of living for today while accepting death.
I can't recommend this movie to anyone older than high school age, but French-cinema fans might want to check out the laughably incongruous scene in which Claflin persuades Clarke to watch Of Gods and Men, Xavier Beauvois's harrowing metaphysical drama about a group of martyred Franciscan monks.
But one rainy day, he decides to watch a French DVD—“ Of Gods and Men ,” about Trappist monks living in war-torn Algeria—and the ice between him and Lou begins to melt after he learns she has never seen a subtitled movie before.
Her novel becomes this summer’s splashy euthanasia romance, and if it’s not quite smart, it is the rare blockbuster where our two lovebirds first bond not by trading hesitant glances but by watching the French religion drama “Of Gods and Men.” Props.
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For those naturally prone to the movie cry — the kind that leaves you in a weepy mess after The Notebook, Love Story, et al. — crocodile tears await in the romantic drama Me Before You.
Of course, this is not the first of its kind (Love Story, The Fault in Our Stars) but Moyes, who also wrote the screenplay, layers the story well with unexpected moments.
But this is meant to be an upbeat tragedy, a class-conscious romance in the mode of Love Story or The Fault in Our Stars crossed with an unlikely friendship story like Intouchables.
This, too, is the kind of medical misfortune that movies like to throw at young lovers, whether it’s cancer in “The Fault in Our Stars” or the vaguely defined illness in “Love Story.”
What you have is “Me Before You,” an exercise not in S&M marathons but an almost completely chaste wallow in sob cinema, the Hollywood prototype of which is “ Love Story .”
It’s a hard one to answer definitively, but I suspect there might be something to my theory that, say, the whimsy of Love Actually, or the melancholy of About Time, or indeed the sweet sorrow of Me Before You, wouldn’t be quite as effective if the characters had flat American accents and lived in Cleveland.
If Richard Curtis (“Love Actually,” “Notting Hill”) lost a bit of his mojo and, in order to keep food on the table, ghostwrote a Nicholas Sparks melodrama , the result would be something a lot like “Me Before You,” the feel-good-then-feel-bad-but-not-quite-as-bad-as-you-might-expect movie of the summer.
Si bien guarda mucha distancia en originalidad a obras románticas preponderantes de manufactura inglesa como Cuatro bodas y un funeral (Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994), Notting Hill (1999) y Realmente amor (Love Actually, 2003), Yo antes de ti es un chick flick de fórmula que desaprovecha la oportunidad en ahondar un delicado tema, pero compensa por la química de los enamorados en cuestión y el carisma de su protagonista femenina.
She’s like Love Actually -era Keira Knightley crossed with a Hello Kitty doll.