PREPARING for this remake of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 low-impact adolescent melodrama, writer/director Shana Feste’s shopping list might have included a couple of kilos of cliché, a litre of improbability and an economy sized can of predictability, all mixed into a slurry and baked in an oven set at flaccid.
Seventeen-year-old Jade (Gabriela Wilde) is the youngest child and only daughter in a slightly-above-middle level of a middle-class family. Medico daddy (Bruce Greenwood) has arranged a hospital internship in preparation for Jade starting a doctor’s degree next year. Mom (Joely Richardson) is in the book business. A room in their house is a shrine to their eldest child dead from cancer.
Across town, 18-year-old David (Alex Pettyfer) lives with his auto mechanic father. Jade and David get tangled in a classic case of teenage lurve to which her dad is implacably opposed.
Hell hath few furies to compare with a blonde princess determined to get her own way with a dishy young man on whom she quickly confers her maidenhood (not thereby giving rise to the reproductive cliché that might have led the drama in a different, more credible, direction).
“Endless Love” the original was never destined to become great cinema. So is this remake, not because it doesn’t try to do better but because its director, having signed off on it, apparently considered it fit for consumption. A more careful view is that it’s potentially toxic for the adolescent princesses forming its target audience. Life’s not like that.
At Hoyts and Limelight
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