(courtesy IMP Awards)
Most romantic comedies (romcoms) would have you believe, and honestly this kind of escapism is why we loe them so much, that all you have to do to move beyond the pain and trauma of your past or present is to meet someone special and suddenly, WHOOSH!, all your troubles are swept away.
If only life was that convenient.
The truth is, deep-seated issues don’t vanish like a items subjected to a disappearing spell, and while it’s lovely to imagine them fading in an instant and true love and happiness replacing them in an instant, that’s simply not how things work.
A masterful and thoughtful romcom like Falling into Place knows this, with the film, written and directed by one of the leads, Aylin Tezel, leading us on a torturous but meaningful journey through the forest of pain and trauma that often stop people following through on real connection in their life.
BUT, and this is important, Falling into Place, which is immersively beautiful even in its darkest moments, also knows that slowness of change, of adaptation to something promising and wonderful, doesn’t preclude that the usual expected romcom destination can’t be reached.
It might just take a while with the result being more than worth the exhaustingly intense journey to get there.
As the film begins, we meet Kira (Tezel) and Ian (Chris Fulton), two people sitting separately on a bus heading to the Scottish island of Skye – Ian is there, clearly reluctantly to see his family, who live on a small windswept property out of town while Kira is on the run, hoping that time and distance will help her to get ahead of the wracking pain of a broken heart.
They notice each other on the bus, as you notice anyone on those weird, long bus trips that seem to take forever and exist as their own strange, time-twisted world apart, but only really get talking much later that might outside a pub where there is an obvious and immediate connection.
So profoundly intense but lasting is this connection that Ian, who has a girlfriend back in London with whom things are quietly rocky at best, and Kira spend the night together, not having sex but talking and laughing and even goofing around, simply enjoying the pleasure and release of being in the company of someone they intrinsically know has found a place in the depths of their soul.
But both are damaged by the respective pain they’re undergoing – their separate traumas are explored in a beautiful real-time way that makes it clear they are tough and challenging but not intractable, with agency still available to both of them in how they respond and navigate their issues – and while it is clear they are each other’s people, even then, they can’t do anything about it and return back to their homes in London.\
There they fumble their lives to a greater or lesser extent, unable to work out who they are or what they want to do, but slowly, so realistically slowly, they pick up pieces here and there, experience a lightbulb moment or two and life begins to finally coalesce in ways that don’t suggest immediate healing but that it is possible, and will happen, if they just pay attention to the emotional road signs along the way.
Where Falling into Place succeeds is in establishing, with a real poetic beauty that belies their pain, how deeply Kira and Ian have connected; it’s this profound sense of how deeply they have found each other in just a day and a night that powers a narrative which lets two people keep making mistakes and exercising errors of judgement until, well, they don’t.
Just like real life.
Most people, if they are shown a way forward, usually end up taking it; they may not get it right immediately or for a good long, which is certainly true of Kira and Ian, but they do eventually get it, and Falling into Place is about what happens while they are trying to get it right and once they do.
It is, as a result, a truly affecting film that sweeps you up in the grandeur and possibility of nascent love, true love (that still has a way to go before its finds its true and eventual form), which is happy to ground itself in how hard it can be to leave where you are for where your heart knows you can be, and that, all indications to the contrary, that something special lies in wait when you finally make that journey.
Watching Falling into Place is less about simply taking in a film than immersively living the lives of Ian and Kira right along with them.
We are there for every hopeful moment, every backward step and every quietly exciting move forward, and while you wonder how two people can make so many poor choices when such a good one lies before them – for the record, neither gets the other’s number on Skye so it’s not simply a matter of sending an impulsive text – it suddenly hits you, because of the meaningfully qualitative time we’re spending with them, that this is exactly how all of us do the big and good things.
We want to go rushing in but we often don’t and it takes a lot of fumbling and messing around to get to the point where the desires of our heart, even pushed down and barely recognised through choice rather than actuality – each remembers the other but has consigned that magical day and night on Skye to the stuff of dreams and impossibility – finally find their heartstopping and life transformative form.
But it’s the getting there that is so masterful and which makes Falling into Place, which has a beautifully balanced and emotionally questioning and tense final act where nothing is guaranteed but each characters happiness, such a joyously fulfilling film to watch.
This is real life, and we are along for the ride with two people who fumble and stumble but finally get there, just as many of us often do, and whose eventual arrival at their hoped-for destination, is a thing of truly moving beauty and sweet, charming, heartwarming fun.