Harry Wootliff (2018)
Elena (Laia Costa) and Jake (Josh O’Connor) meet by chance one New Year’s Eve. They spend the night together, fall in love and decide, without further ado, to start a family. In the early stages of Harry Wootliff’s debut feature – she’s previously made shorts and written, mostly for television – the couple enjoy a physically passionate relationship and are very happy together. In other words, Elena and Jake travel a fair emotional distance in a short time and the handheld camera that Wootliff favours, particularly at the start of Only You, gives an impression of sustained activity. Once they’ve moved in together, though, the story, for a while, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The protagonists are clearly devoted to each other. You feel their happiness has to be marred by one of two things: serious illness or difficulties in making a baby. It’s the latter. Elena’s failure to conceive brings their partnership to the edge of collapse – and over the edge.
Elena is Spanish and Jake English but the story takes place mostly in Glasgow. I was never clear as to why Elena had next to no contact with her family in Spain or what her job was: anyway, she’s well enough off to have bought her own flat in Glasgow. At the start, Jake is close to completing his research degree studies in marine biology (and he gets his doctorate). An only child, he’s still close to his widowed father Andrew (Peter Wight), who lives somewhere in the English countryside. Elena’s encounter with Jake happens after she’s left a New Year party at the home of her best friend Carly (Lisa McGrillis). The latter’s elder brother Shane (Stuart Martin) has been hitting on Elena; Carly has encouraged her, without success, to respond positively. Unlike Elena, Jake hasn’t been drinking but DJ-ing. Whereas the conversation at Carly’s party occurs on screen, Jake reports what he’s been up to – when he and Elena hail the same cab in the early hours of New Year’s Day, and end up sharing it.
That difference is an immediate hint that Only You will primarily be strong-willed Elena’s story but Harry Wootliff quickly tells us plenty about Jake. When Elena protests she hailed the cab first, Jake doesn’t argue; it’s the cabbie (Joe Cassidy) who insists that Jake was the one who caught his eye. Jake’s conscientious, somewhat naive nature is suggested in his explanation, good-humoured but seriously meant, of why a DJ needs to stay sober. Two people dead-heating in competition for a taxi isn’t an entirely unknown starting point for a screen romance. It’s as if Wootliff wants to take a cliché and, through credible individual detail, reanimate it – and she succeeds. During the car journey, Elena thinks she’s going to throw up and has to get out of the cab. She says she’ll walk home from where they’ve got to; she and Jake part company. Yet when Wootliff cuts from this straight to Elena’s flat, and Jake is there, it’s entirely convincing, thanks largely to the regretful, uncertain look we noticed in Josh O’Connor’s eye when Elena walked away from him down the street. We don’t know exactly what happened in the meantime – perhaps Wootliff has adjusted another cliché: an instruction to the cab driver to follow that girl, instead of follow that car. At any rate, it makes sense that Elena and Jake are still together.
I’ve dwelt on the opening because, with due respect to Harry Wootliff and her fine cast, it’s the best part of Only You. Most of what follows is well directed and acted but Wootliff takes time – a minute under two hours – to tell what is a slender story, even though it obviously deals with an important subject. (There are no subplots to speak of.) The quasi-documentary description of the IVF procedures Elena undergoes throw into sharp relief her anguish at not becoming pregnant. The age difference between her and Jake – at thirty-five, she’s nine years his senior – is dramatised intelligently. She’s immediately anxious about it, asking him to guess her age; when he says twenty-nine, she doesn’t put him right for some time. It’s persuasive that this is something Elena is always more worried about than Jake and that her age-related infertility is a double whammy.
Yet when the couple decide to forget (not, it turns out, for long) about trying having a child, go dancing together and Wootliff chooses Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ to accompany the dance, the effect of the music is striking. This song is almost bound to supply an emotive boost, even when, as here, there’s no connection between its powerful lyrics and the story on screen. In this case, ‘Smalltown Boy’ makes you realise how much the narrative needs fortifying. (In Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM, it was a reflection of the story’s accumulating power, rather than a shot in the arm.) It’s rather odd this is the musical highlight of the film, with Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’ running a respectable second. On his first visit to her apartment, DJ Jake enthuses over the ‘great taste’ of the vinyl collection Elena inherited from her father but he never seems to get beyond the Costello album, although Wootliff does put on the soundtrack some very pleasant Spanish vocals, accompanied by guitar. I wondered beforehand which version of ‘Only You’ – The Platters or Yazoo – was going to feature in the film. The answer is neither.
Elena and Jake find it increasingly hard to avoid friends and contemporaries who have babies or are expecting them. Wootliff doesn’t show so deft a touch dealing with this aspect of their ordeal: the couple’s social life verges on the masochistic. The direction is both heavy-handed and a little evasive in a sequence late on. Carly, now a mother, marries her long-term partner (Gregor Firth) and asks Elena to be her maid of honour. By this stage, Jake has moved out; at the wedding breakfast, Elena is a spectre at the feast, wearing a dress more suited to a funeral. An older man called Mike (Tam Dean Burn), presumably Carly’s father, insists on saying a few words although the bride, smiling but ready to be embarrassed, reminds him they’d agreed no speeches. Mike, probably with a few drinks under his belt, talks about how a marriage is something forever having to be ‘reconceived’ and ‘reborn’. It’s a pity we don’t see Carly’s reaction to her father’s choice of metaphor, which appears simply to give Elena the idea of reconciling with Jake. Only You is too honest, though, for that to happen in an easily happy ending – and too genuinely concerned about its principals to give them an unequivocally miserable one. Elena and Jake are a couple again in the final shot but their tentative attitude is a reminder that their future together looks uncertain and challenging.
The acting is just about impeccable. I was impressed by Laia Costa, whom I’d not seen before. (Her breakthrough was in the title role of Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria.) Brightly (even irritatingly) flirtatious in the early stages, Elena is gradually exhausted by her frustrated obsession. It erodes her volatility and her bloom. On television, Josh O’Connor has leavened the increasingly mechanical charms of The Durrells and the creaky, often overacted BBC version of Les Misérables with a welcome astringency. He did fine work in Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country but Only You is his best screen performance yet. Jake is a regular guy, in a relationship that he wants but which is mired in unhappiness he didn’t bargain for and struggles to bear. O’Connor shows a lot of vocal skill: Jake speaks in the near-monotone characteristic of his age and middle-class background yet O’Connor gets expressive emotional precision into the lines. The reliably excellent Peter Wight is acute and touching as his father, even though Andrew’s crucial pep talk to his son in the closing stages is conventionally written. Lisa McGrillis is another familiar face from television: in the sitcom Mum, she plays, with formidable accuracy and to greatly annoying effect, the partner of Lesley Manville’s even more annoying son. It’s rather startling to hear the Essex girl of Mum talking in a Scottish accent at the start of Only You. I don’t know whether McGrillis is Essex or Glaswegian or neither but she’s talented: she looks and sounds equally right in both roles.
17 July 2019
