Preview
LOVE THAT BOY
Starring Nadia Litz and Adrien Dixon.
Directed by Andrea Dorfman.
Opens Friday, December 12
Uptown Screen
An overachieving Halifax university student refuses to put up with other people’s mediocrity in this terrific romantic comedy by Parsley Days director Andrea Dorfman.
Played with a stern expression and a fervid air of determination by Nadia Litz, Phoebe comes from a long line of accomplished women and will not let anything stand between her and her goals. Phoebe keeps a list of those goals on her fridge: entries include "forage for edible wilds," "black belt" and "understand jazz." All that matters to Phoebe is being able to cross off each entry – in order to accomplish her goal of watching every French new wave film, she blithely watches the movies on fast-forward.
She is nearly as hard on her browbeaten best friend and roommate as she is on herself. "You can do better than that," she says to Robin (Nikki Barnett) again and again. Doing better is what Phoebe is all about.
Robin finally cracks under the pressure and accuses her of lacking any regard for humanity beyond herself. Phoebe is stunned – "I love humanity," she says. "I volunteer." Robin’s sudden departure means Phoebe is on her own as she faces two of her toughest challenges before graduation – getting her kayak certification and landing a boyfriend. Her project goes further awry when she falls for the least appropriate boy around: Frazer (Adrien Dixon), the lanky, sheepish 14-year-old who cuts her lawn. Love That Boy ain’t exactly Lolita, but the age difference still creates a range of complications for Litz’s superior-minded heroine.
Daffy and big-hearted, Love That Boy succeeds handily at its own more modest ambitions. Although the slight storyline is nearly stretched to the breaking point by the time of the final scenes, the writing is too tart for the proceedings to ever descend into whimsy and the characters are presented with great care by the cast, especially the gamine-like Litz (who viewers might remember for playing Toronto’s least trustworthy babysitter in The Five Senses) and the sweetly guileless Dixon. The way that Dorfman’s movie captures the tentativeness, lightness and strange luminescence of young love (and in Phoebe’s case, very young love) recalls Bill Forsythe’s ever-wondrous Gregory’s Girl. I can think of no higher compliment. |
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