Cannes Film Festival
Un Certain Regard
“What can you say about a 25 year-old girl who died?” Written by Erich Segal before being plaintively voiced by Ryan O’Neal, this presumably rhetorical question is the opening gambit of “Love Story,” the simple but phenomenally successful weeper in which a young couple’s relationship is prematurely halted when the girl contracts leukemia — a bummer at any stage of life, but particularly so when you’re young and in love and have Ali MacGraw’s very nice hair.
As it turned out, the film didn’t have an awful lot to say about the 25 year-old in question, beyond the indirect observations that love is sweet, death is sad and that neither one of those truths alters the other. Gus Van Sant’s new film “Restless,” meanwhile, asks the same question — just with a slightly lower number replacing the 25 — and, as laws of both algebra and Hollywood would have it, asks it to somewhat lower returns.