THE LAST LETTER FROM YOUR LOVER / VIDEO : Trailer (2021)

The Last Letter from Your Lover is a 2021 British romantic drama film directed by Augustine Frizzell and written by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding, based on Jojo Moyes' 2012 novel of the same name. It stars Felicity Jones, Callum Turner, Joe Alwyn, Nabhaan Rizwan and Shailene Woodley.

 

The Last Letter from Your Lover was released on Netflix in select territories on 23 July 2021, in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 6 August 2021, by StudioCanal, and in Scandinavia on 30 July 2021, by SVENSK.

 

Plot

In modern day, Ellie Haworth, a journalist completely uninterested in romance, has to write an article about the recently-deceased editor of her paper. Getting past the formal archivist Rory to access the editor's archive, she finds a love letter, to someone identified as "J", from "Boot". Moved by the passionate feelings between the mysterious couple, Ellie becomes determined to learn their identities and how their love story ended.

 

In the mid-1960s, wealthy socialites Jennifer Stirling and her husband Laurence travel to the French Riviera for a summer vacation. Foreign correspondent Anthony O'Hare arrives to interview Laurence. During a dinner party, Jennifer overhears Anthony insulting the Stirlings and their spoiled lifestyle, prompting Anthony to apologize to Jennifer. Anthony invites the Stirlings out to eat the next day, but Laurence is called away on a sudden business trip, leaving Jennifer and Anthony to spend the summer together until his return. They begin writing letters to each other, under the pennames "J" and "Boot" (or "B"). Neither act on their growing electricity, until Jennifer impulsively tries to kiss him. When he pulls away, she flees. Some days later, a letter penned by Anthony reaches her, proposing to meet at Postman's Park in London.

 

They start a whirlwind affair, spending moments together where she can safely be with him. Finally, he proposes she run off with him to New York. Jennifer is hesitant to leave, in fear of being treated as outcast by her family and friends. After Anthony sends her a letter that he will be waiting for her at the train station on the night of his departure, Jennifer rushes off to meet him. Just before she can arrive, she gets into car accident, with a blow to her head causing partial amnesia. Anthony leaves for New York, believing that Jennifer has rejected him.

 

Six months after the car accident, Laurence hides the last letter Jennifer received from Anthony in effort to prevent her from remembering the affair. Jennifer feels lost as she struggles to recover her memories. She begins finding several of the love letters from "Boot" hidden in her house, leading her to discover a postal box in her name that Laurence had closed. Jennifer confronts Laurence, who claims Anthony had died in the crash. Four years later, Jennifer bumps into Anthony, restoring her memories of their time together. Anthony once again pleads for her to run away with him, but she refuses out of consideration for her two-year old-daughter. Enraged at Laurence for his lies, Jennifer asserts that she will stay with him because of their daughter, but vows to leave if he mistreats her. In turn, Laurence threatens to ruin Jennifer's reputation and gain sole custody of their daughter, as she would only be seen as an adulteress by the court of law. This prompts Jennifer to escape with their daughter to go with Anthony. After finding out he has checked out of his hotel a few days ago, she tries finding him at his workplace, but is informed by the editor that Anthony has already left. Forced to return to Laurence, Jennifer gives the bundle of love letters to the editor to be sent to Anthony if they hear back from him.

 

In the present day, Ellie and Rory grow closer as they uncover more of the love letters. After spending the night with Rory, Ellie distances herself from him. She learns that Jennifer and Anthony are both alive. After speaking with them and hearing their regrets and pain over their lost romance, Ellie decides to enter into a relationship with Rory, not wanting to live with regrets. Ellie returns to Anthony and encourages him to write one last letter to Jennifer, in which he asks her to meet him once again at Postman's Park. Ellie and Rory watch from a distance as the two lovers reunite.

 

‘The Last Letter From Your Lover’ Review: Shailene Woodley Has an Affair to Remember, Felicity Jones Gets One to Forget

 

Odd-choice director Augustine Frizzell brings chic visual style to this otherwise generically watchable, timeline-crossing romance.

 

By Guy Lodge

https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/the-last-letter-from-your-lover-review-1235025523/

 

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Last Letter From Your Lover Netflix

Netflix

The past isn’t just a different country, but a different movie entirely, in “The Last Letter From Your Lover,” a lushly mounted pair of love stories — one present, one past — that are faintly enmeshed but almost entirely disparate in tone, style and emotional impression. In the first, Shailene Woodley and Callum Turner fall hard for each other in an obstacle-strewn, 1960s-set romance of chance encounters, missed connections and moist-eyed rendezvous on railway platforms, channeling the vintage Hollywood melodrama of “An Affair to Remember.” In the second, Felicity Jones is a cut-glass hybrid of Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones, falling only incidentally for the awkward archivist who assists her in piecing together the former story, before the narratives merge in a more British, neatly calligraphed rewrite of “The Notebook.”

 

Having previously made her name with the spiky, Sundance-stamped girls-gone-wild comedy “Never Goin’ Back,” director Augustine Frizzell doesn’t seem an obvious fit for any of the dewy, edgeless mini-movies that make up “The Last Letter From Your Lover”: Sure enough, she had no hand in the script, which playwright Nick Payne and author Esta Spalding have drawn with little great inspiration from the 2008 bestseller by Jojo Moyes, the same wildly popular romance novelist who wrote “Me Before You.”

 

Yet Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison. Even at its most generic, however, this letter from an unlikely woman fills a gaping slot in the summer schedule for grown-up, female-oriented entertainment, and should find keen recipients upon its release on Netflix in the U.S., and in theaters across the pond.

 

The film opens with an on-screen quote from Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” scrawled across the screen like an original love note: “Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.” It’s a somewhat misleading choice of literary flourish, and not just because the classic novel that unites its star-crossed couple in fact turns out to be Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” Suffice it to say that “Last Letter” is an awfully long way from the elemental terseness of Hemingway even at his most romantic. The love letters that bounce the film’s narrative across the decades are floridly impassioned missives, full of swollen-hearted feeling and do-or-die pleas — the kind, the film unsubtly and wistfully observes, that feel desirably quaint in the age of instant messaging and eggplant emoji.

 

Their author is Anthony (Turner), a scrappy London financial journalist besotted with Jennifer (Woodley), the cosseted American trophy wife of wealthy, wooden-hearted business magnate Larry (Joe Alwyn), whom he meets in the summer of 1965 on a French Riviera trip of sunlit village rambles and glittering yacht rides. (The film may characterize Larry as a villainous capitalist, but drinks in the couple’s lifestyle with gilded pleasure.) The attraction is mutual, and intense: In roles that might have been played by Burton and Taylor at the time of the film’s setting, Turner and Woodley have something like genuine, lip-biting chemistry, making us root for their union even as the script labors to keep them apart, down to the quasi-camp melodramatic trope of selective amnesia, Hollywood style. Turner, who drew the short straw among the male stars of last year’s “Emma.,” emerges here as a suitably swoonsome but appealingly wiry romantic lead.

 

In the present day, meanwhile, Jones plays Ellie, a single, romantically wounded journalist at a London paper whose newsroom even Nancy Meyers might call out for being implausibly folksy. Apparently on the kind of dream contract where she gets a week to write a single obituary, she stumbles upon Anthony’s fiery, enigmatically initialed letters in the course of her research and is immediately sidetracked, determined to uncover the whos, whys and whens of this seemingly unresolved affair. Assisting her in this matter is sweet, shy archive manager Rory (an endearing Nabhaan Rizwan), whose attraction to the strangely glassy, self-oriented Ellie is script-determined from their first stiff meet-cute, but never supplemented by a palpable rapport between the characters or the actors playing them.

 

Frizzell, one senses, doesn’t much care: She’s left her heart in 1965, as she, DP George Steel (“The Aeronauts”) and costume designer Anna Robbins (“Downton Abbey”) set about making the film’s most old-fashioned romance as classically gorgeous as possible, all sensually blazing flesh tones and neon-in-rainfall reflections and lighting so velvet-soft the frame frequently feels on the verge of dissolving entirely. The relationship between Jennifer and Anthony may be thinly conceived, but Frizzell has the gift of getting her audience to invest in sheer beauty alone: Stray frames here recall Vincente Minnelli or Wong Kar-wai, before settling back into an overall aesthetic of less distinctive but nonetheless pleasing plushness. Would that the rest of “The Last Letter From Your Lover” made quite such a lavish, concerted effort to seduce: One leaves the film thinking they don’t make ’em like they used to, even when they’re making ’em all at once.

 

Fashionista

In 'The Last Letter From Your Lover,' Designer Vintage Helps Tell a Secret Love Story

Fawnia Soo Hoo

Wed, 28 July 2021, 1:00 pm·6-min read

https://fashionista.com/2021/07/netflix-the-last-letter-from-your-lover-costumes

https://uk.style.yahoo.com/last-letter-lover-designer-vintage-120000590.html

 

Emmy nominee (and "Downtown Abbey" costume designer) Anna Robbins also incorporated modern-day Ferragamo heels into the flashback scenes.

 

Warning: Spoilers for 'The Last Letter From Your Lover' below.

 

In "The Last Letter From Your Lover," modern-day London journalist Ellie (Felicity Jones) unravels the story behind a secret romance in the '60s. The audience sees flashbacks of missed moments between dashing reporter Anthony O'Hara (Callum Turner) and unhappily married Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley). But it's in the pivotal scenes that costume designer Anna Robbins enhances the slow burn — or high tension — through a stunning wardrobe.

 

When Jennifer resists kissing Anthony for the very first time, she tentatively approaches his hotel room (to then run off) in a divine Eau de Nil brocade dress with an alluring side and back cut-out (below). Later, when he suggests running away together, telling her she's "wasted in the life" she's living, Jennifer, understandably, turns and flees, revealing a voluminous bow and gorgeously draped pleats billowing out behind her with her berry ensemble (two below). "The back view is just as important as the front view," says Robbins.

 

Of course, the two-time Emmy nominee has costume designed plenty of glamorous period wardrobes, including the "Downton Abbey" series and both films.

 

To portray Jennifer's restrained and dissatisfied society wife, married to the sneeringly bland Lawrence (Joe Alwyn), Robbins looked to the "fashion plates" of the era and issues of Vogue from 1965, '66 and '69. "Her whole lifestyle was based around being a wife and dressing correctly for every occasion and never really being completely free," says Robbins. "It's that sense of everything being meticulously put together, so that the coats are matching the dress and we've got gloves to go with hats... " On the sun-drenched French Riviera, where Jennifer first meets Anthony, for example, and back home in chilly London, she wears monochrome and color-blocked palettes, with elegant scooped necklines, pencil skirts and boxy boats, in perfectly coordinated ensembles.

 

Robbins' color palette for Jennifer delineates not only the jumping timelines, but also the character's hopes and spirits, frolicking about the South of France with Anthony and then juggling real life with Lawrence/Larry at home. "You've got pink, yellow and blue in the Riviera and then, when you bring it back to London, you've got such a dark aubergine and the chartreuse, the dark greens," says Robbins. "She's happy in the Riviera."

 

During a seaside dinner party, Jennifer maintains her composure and resolve in a custom-made pink chiffon sheer-sleeve cape gown, despite being condescended to by Larry ("my wife considers anything but the pages of Vogue unworthy of her attention") and catching a sloppy drunk Anthony dismissing the society wives. "I just wanted a really specific color to offset the inky, inky night sky, the tones of the villa and the lighting with the gents in their white jackets," says Robbins, who took inspiration from a flowing Coco Chanel-designed dress in the 1961 French-Italian avant-garde film, "Last Year in Marienbad."

 

For a romantic sailing trip with Anthony, Robbins found a vintage yellow dress with white seashell-like beading embellishments on the bib (below). "It pretty much fit like a glove when we put it on Shailene," she says. "You tend to do a fitting and see what's working and then start visualizing where these things might fit into the script. Straightaway, it felt like the yacht moment was the time for that dress to be worn. You're against the blue of the sea and the sky."

 

Robbins used a mix of custom-designed pieces (like a pale-blue coat and pillbox hat, with delicate matching patterned trim, for a frantic run through the rain) and authentic looks '60s, including designer gems from London mainstay William Vintage. "I was looking at Dior and Balenciaga and Lanvin," says Robbins.

 

She points to a cream-hued "amazing Courrèges coat" which Jennifer wears with a dark green fedora, as she reads Anthony's letter pleading with her to run away with him. A Dior piece "with a great draped back with a bow" served as an inspiration for a sexily modest bespoke black tunic dress with a cropped jacket which fastens at the back. "In 1969, when she bumps into Anthony on the street and faints, and then she's in the hotel room and and he's helping her dress, that's what that dress is," Robbins says. "Just looking at the beautiful couture construction of the pieces of that time." Jennifer wears actual vintage Dior — a houndstooth cowl-neck short-sleeve top and panel-front skirt — for her thwarted attempt to leave Larry (below).

 

For all of Jennifer's perfectly accessorized '60s outfits, Robbins used mostly vintage bags and gloves, plus a mix of retro and custom jewelry. "We did use Ferragamo shoes, which can can be a brilliant match for the '60s, like slightly square toe and square heels," she says.

 

But the costume designer points out that Jennifer's streamlined, mid-'60s wardrobe is actually more reflective of the late-'50s in silhouette and spirit. "We see that Carnaby Street '60s vibe, but through her car window," Robbins says. "She's observing that, but she's not part of it. The world she inhabits this is still one foot in the '50s."

 

The unrestrained swinging '60s is most represented through costumes in contemporary times — especially as seen on Ellie, who discovers Anthony's letters to Jennifer in the newspaper archives, managed by nerdy-hot Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan).

 

"Had Ellie been in the '60s with Jennifer, she'd have been living the life that Jennifer wished she was living. She's free and liberated," says Robbins, who also used details like classic houndstooth textures to connect the two. "Actually, we put more typically '60s prints and patterns into the contemporary section, rather than the '60s. We've got Liberty prints on Rory. It's more organic prints and it feels a bit more haphazard, layered and a bit freer."

 

To illustrate Ellie's "Diane Keaton meets a French chic-Scandi cool vibe," Robbins infused actual '60s vintage into her wardrobe, including a Burberry trench (above), which offered a more relaxed update of Jennifer's pristine neutral car coats. Ellie also wears a pair of black square-toed court shoes from Jennifer's time: "They just set off the real kind of French dandy vibe with a bit of Diane Keaton thrown in," says Robbins. "So rather than them ending up in the 1960s, they ended up in Ellie's wardrobe."