2561. Our Lovers (2016)

Starring: Eduardo Noriega, Michelle Jenner, Amaia Salamanca

Director: Miguel Ángel Lamata

Running Time: 92 mins

Our Lovers (Nuestros amantes) is a Spanish film about a man and a woman who meet one day in a café, and then develop a unique and strong relationship over the following weeks.

Boy meets girl, cheesy romance, yaddah yaddah yaddah – you know the story. Except, in the case of Our Lovers, you don’t know the story, because while cheesy romance is certainly at the centre of this film, there’s something so brilliantly strange and quirky about the way it tells an age-old story, complete with two immensely endearing lead performances, captivating dialogue and a wonderfully light-hearted and playful atmosphere throughout.

As a result, Our Lovers is an absolute joy to watch, and whether you’re a big rom-com fan or someone who detests the genre, this film manages to blend enough cheesy, generic tropes and genre-breaking ingenuity to make for an entirely engrossing watch from beginning to end.

Starting off in eye-catching fashion with a bizarre and delightfully awkward meet-cute, the strange relationship that develops between Eduardo Noriega and Michelle Jenner’s characters is an absolute joy to follow, with the quirky rules they follow forming the basis for their ever-deepening but forever honest and heartwarming relationship.

In all honesty, the majority of Our Lovers is just a series of dialogue sequences between the two in a number of different locations strung together. With a cheesy and fairly predictable story, that sounds like the makings of a tedious watch, but as well as that brilliantly quirky atmosphere and playful sense of humour I mentioned just now, the dialogue and acting is really, really fantastic – something that you don’t often see in the romantic comedy genre.

So, while the overall narrative arc leaves quite a lot to be desired, it’s the content and nature of the conversations between these two characters through the movie that makes it so delightful and surprisingly engrossing. Passing from quirky and flirty chats about hypotheticals and the most random bits of life to emotional and heartfelt discussions about love and relationships, the film had me entirely hooked from beginning to end, both captivating me in the ever-stronger relationship between the two, and also entertaining me with its strange, quirky tendencies.

And that’s something that so many romantic comedies forget to do: have fun. While there is some real drama here, and it’s certainly not a film that’s entirely there to make you laugh, Our Lovers finds a brilliant balance between romantic drama and enjoyable comedy throughout. In that, its flirty, playful qualities will make you smile and giggle from time to time, endearing you all the more to the characters, and as such allowing you to connect with them when it comes to the more serious moments.

So, films like this show that, to be a romantic, dramatically moving film, you don’t have to forget about having fun, and a little bit of lightness and likability is actually all the more effective in bringing that drama home in even more striking fashion.

Eduardo Noriega and Michelle Jenner work so well on screen together that the film has that pure, blissful sense of romance that’s really, very hard to capture. The excellent dialogue gives them a brilliant, organic back and forth that’s reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally, and that lighter, flirty atmosphere adds to the sheer enjoyability factor of the movie as a whole.

In short, Our Lovers is a delight. Romantic, fluffy and funny but equally captivating and strikingly unorthodox, the movie will keep you engrossed throughout in a story that you’ve definitely seen before, but never quite in this way, and that’s why I’m giving it a 7.8 overall.