Love Tomorrow

Christopher Payne’s second offering as director is an earnest homage to dance, music and movement. It seeks to emancipate ballet from the confines of opera houses and introduce it to the silver screen. The two leads are played by professional ballet dancers rather than actors, Love Tomorrow attempting to engage the audience through untapped channels in a hyper-realistic fashion.

Eva (Cindy Jourdain) meets Cuban ballerino Oriel (Arionel Vargas) on the London underground when he recognises her as a fellow dancer. Initially Oriel’s intentions appear less than honourable, but he quickly recognises that Eva is in a state of considerable mental atrophy. He guides her around London, yet despite the close proximity their intimacy remains platonic and transcendental.

With the clear influence of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy – Jourdain’s wide-eyed, melancholic gaze evokes Irène Jacob in Rouge – there is a lot to be admired in the understated dialogue and drama of this film. Immigrant life in London is an interesting, but perhaps underdeveloped subtext; Oriel has visa issues that are referenced throughout the film, and many of his friends are immigrants. The more cineliterate viewer will certainly notice similarities with Stephen Fears’ 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things – though Love Tomorrow is distinctly more bourgeois.

The film is not without fault: its main issue is that it suffers from a lack of dance, and from a dearth in quality and complexity in what dance there is. Make no mistake, Love Tomorrow is meant to be a dance film rather than a film about dancers, and yet the dance segments suffer from a lack of passion.

The revelations and drama should be expressed through ballet – a film about dance without much dance is comparable to a musical without much music. Imagine Natalie Wood in West Side Story declaring a spoken desire to live in America because its socio-economic conditions are more favourable than those in Puerto Rico… Not quite the same as breaking into impassioned Latin rumba, America.

Love Tomorrow fails to find that extra gear in terms of passion, and therefore may disappoint true dance enthusiasts, though there is enough here to merit a viewing.       

Guy de Vito

Love Tomorrow is released in selected cinemas on 8^th November 2013.

Watch the trailer for Love Tomorrow here: