Love Sarah (2020) - Movie Review

Certain forms of media tend to bleed out into other forms of media. With how multidisciplinary art can become in the right hands, along with how everything ends up influencing everything else, every so often, I come across films that feel like cinematic reskins of other types of storytelling. In some cases, that can add layers to the production and the story, but in other cases (the latter being the unfortunate majority out there), it just makes me question why it just isn’t that other kind of media to begin with.

Ostensibly a British dramedy with elements of romance, this sets itself up as soul food with a side dish of progressive multiculturalism. After the death of the titular Sarah, her daughter Clarissa, her mother Mimi, and her former business partner Isabella, all set out to fulfil Sarah’s wish of opening a bakery in Notting Hill. After some teething problems with the location, they hit on the idea that they should start baking confectionaries that reflect the multicultural locals, making baked goods originating from Japan, Latvia and even from over here in Australia.

I fear I have already made this film out to be a lot more interesting than it actually is, because that aspect is only one in a myriad of different thematic ingredients that have seemingly been thrown into this thing at random. We also have rather milquetoast love stories, dealing with grief concerning Sarah’s death, fulfilling the wishes of the dead vs. fulfilling your own, and the bakery chef possibly being Clarissa’s estranged father.

Here’s where I get into what I meant by this feeling like a different form of media: The story as a whole, with all its middling components taken into account, feels like I’m watching a Best Of compilation of a six-episode British sitcom. One where all the emotional landings are intact, but all of the lead-up has been edited out for brevity. I mean, if this was a sitcom, or even a lead-in into a sitcom proper, then the spacing out of the story could’ve resulted in better characterisation, chances for the individual ideas to actually breathe and take hold, and given the overall story more of a drive than ‘everything we see takes place in a bakery’.

What makes the lack of engagement even more disappointing is that, for a story that feels so safely frothy, the presentation is a lot less airbrushed than I was expecting. Aaron Reid’s cinematography refrains from prettying-up the locales and the people that occupy them, highlighting the more grounded approach that makes for an easy argument re: British filmmaking being better than American filmmaking (not that I’ll make it here, admittedly), and while it does drift in and out of character psyches too often to really grab hold, the smaller moments with characters reacting to what’s happening around him (particularly Sarah’s death) actually do make an impact. It just would’ve been better if they put in a better context, and not watered-down with so much else going on.

While there’s aspects that I can vibe with, like the potential for the film’s showing of multiculturalism to irritate champions of the British conservative establishment… ugh, if I have to stretch for political spite to make a film worth appreciating, I’m doing my job wrong. It’s just a bland offering that, at best, is an example of a good story in the wrong medium.