Love & other remedies.
Moments of inspired delicacy in the ‘impotent’ America of the 90s.
Jamie Randall is a young man skilled with women and words. A relentless and unemployed seducer, after getting to know his employer’s wife too deeply, Jamie starts again as a pharmaceutical worker and becomes a sales representative for Pfizer. Shipped to the northeastern corner of the United States to ‘peddle’ antidepressants, to double Prozac and to beat the competition, Mr. Randall cajoles doctors and seduces secretaries, revealing himself in a short time, a lot of action and great charm to be the number one salesman. Daydreaming of leaving Ohio to fly with a promotion to Chicago, Jamie stumbles upon Maggie, a bohemian artist suffering from stage one Parkinson’s disease. Greedy for sex but resistant to feelings and stable relationships, Jamie and Maggie become passionate lovers. In love, in spite of themselves, they will try to resist and resist the temptation to love each other.
The eternal law of sentimental comedy, matured in the 1930s, establishes that the distance and the (sacred) mystery of bodies are the space that desire must traverse. Nevertheless, something has changed over time and if some Hollywood romantic comedies insist on frequenting the past by reiterating the norm of sex that proceeds in disguise and by innuendo, Edward Zwick casually deserts the rules of the genre. With the timing of comedy and within a comedy that is not comedy, at least not entirely, the American director consumes his protagonists in impetuous embraces, finding every secret of the heart between the sheets. And right at the heart is wager and post of Loves & other remedies. The erotic energy necessary to sustain the inexhaustible sexual performance is embodied by Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, already an (un)happy couple within the pastoral idyll of Ang Lee (The Secrets of Brokeback Mountain). Survivors of a marriage gone bad in the shadow of a mountain, the two actors meet in Ohio carrying with them and inside the comedy the signs of a melodramatic past. Their bodies and their joyful and sensual adherence dry the traces of Zwick’s fainting lyricism, playing two differently unhappy souls, lost in melancholy and in the desire to love each other despite a degenerative disease.
Too often guilty of a cinema (Wind of Passions, The Last Samurai, Defiance, etc.) packaged image by image with the viewer’s applause or the achievement of an award in mind, of immediately comprehensible films that already contain in the act of production that of interpretation, Zwick this time dares nuances, variants and implicits, finding moments of inspired (and unhoped-for) delicacy. Combining romance with comedy, Love & Other Remedies exhibits sentiment and divertissement in the ‘impotent’ America of the 1990s that corrected exasperated puritanism, experimented with orgasms in the laboratory and started the Viagra race. The years in which the faded boomers found themselves incapable of ‘loving’ and Pfizer reduced the American dream to (blue) pills.
Just great.
delicious sweet wonderful fantastic movie, one of those that make you laugh, cry, fall in love, move you inSimply fantastic sum! The theme is unfortunately very topical, but it does not dwell too much on the melodrama of Parkinson’s but tries to find remedies to it with a lot of irony and humor! And then well.. Jake and Anne are divine.
A little film that you can easily forget.
Too much nudism, too much sex distracts from the serious problem that the film tackles, namely that of illness. The two protagonists are a beautiful sight but it almost seems like an exhibitionism especially on the part of Jake G. However, the comedy is now too predictable, the novelties are too few and it is obvious that the stars and therefore the judgment remains low. The performances are good, the actors are very capable, although I prefer to see J.G in more demanding roles, as he continues »
Nice and pleasant to watch.
Very nice, pleasant to see, blunt jokes, and embarrassing scenes. We try to play down and make fun of Parkinson’s disease. Meanwhile, almost as if everything were normal, and therefore falls into the background, it opens a window on the pharmaceutical companies that base the buisnes, on the sick and pressure the doctors with cash prizes and holidays in order to sell their products even if they are not perfectly healthy.
Not bad but something is missing.
A film that starts quietly, also seasoned with obvious and somewhat vulgar jokes, then grows in tone and finally gets to the heart of it when the salesman and the sick girl begin to get to know each other. The film here is very enjoyable with scenes that are never predictable and never trivial that amuse and soften the viewer. In the end, the film perhaps loses a bit of lucidity and does not convey the emotion that I personally would have expected. However, the idea of seeing the disease also in its “ironic” side is nice (the more »
You have never thought this of me. I never knew anyone who really thought I wanted something, until I met you. And then you made me believe it, so unfortunately I need you and you need me!”
and then you meet one person and your life is changed forever!
LEARN MORE | Love & Other Remedies takes us back to the era of Viagra.
Sex is the soul of commerce.
In the days surrounding Valentine’s Day, every year there is a distribution war to see who brings to the cinema the film, Italian or not, most suitable for the loving sensibility of the paying public. Whether such a policy is more the commandment of the heart of romantic producers or the business alternative to canned words and chocolate-stained quotations, we defer to everyone’s good conscience. What is interesting to note is that, this year, with Fausto Brizzi’s Females declaring war on the Males but putting up a truce with the pages of the third volume of Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’amore (three are the weeks that separate the releases of the two Italian pink blockbusters), there are two foreign films willingly predisposed to welcome couples on a free release in the cold evenings of late winter, which revolve around two protagonists who make a profitable business out of sex and sensuality.
