Movie Review: LONGING

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: June 7th, 2024 / 06:25 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Richard Gere, Suzanne Clément, Diane Kruger, Jessica Clement, Tomaso Sanelli, Larry Day, Marnie McPhail, Alex Ivanovici, Jessikah Roberts, Kevin Hanchard, Stuart Hughes
Writer: Savi Gabizon, based on the 2017 film LONGING (GA’AGUA) written by Savi Gabizon
Director: Savi Gabizon
Distributor: Lionsgate
Release Date: June 7, 2024 (theatrical); June 28, 2024 (VOD/digital)

Let’s start by giving LONGING its due – it’s seldom boring.

LONGING is an English-language, Canadian-set remake of the 2017 Israeli feature LONGING (GA’AGUA) of the same name. The original won a number of awards. Even though both were written and directed by Savi Gabizon, we have to wonder if something was lost in translation.

The 2017 LONGING is largely described (this reviewer has not seen that film, but has read write-ups) as a dark comedy. The current LONGING, however, comes across as straight drama, which means that a lot of it has a questioning whether the main character is meant to be as strange and tone-deaf as he seems, or whether Gabizon thinks the man is still within the range of normal human behavior.

We are introduced to Daniel (Richard Gere), a successful American businessman, conversing with his assistant via his car’s audio system. Daniel meets up with former lover Rachel (Suzanne Clément). They haven’t seen each other in twenty years, but clearly the relationship was meaningful to both of them.

Rachel has flown out to see Daniel from where she’s living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She has a double-whammy for him. First, their union resulted in a son, Allen (Tomaso Sanelli). Second, Allen, age nineteen, has just died in a car accident.

Daniel flies up to Hamilton for the funeral, but also compulsively seeks information on Allen’s life. The search leads him to Alice (Diane Kruger), Allen’s high school teacher. Allen’s expression of his crush on Alice led to his expulsion from school.

This is our first sign that Daniel and Rachel may be viewing Allen through rose-colored glasses, since neither of them seems acquainted with the notion, social or legal, of stalking. For her part, Alice is astonishingly accommodating to Daniel, while at the same time leaving him unprepared for news she knows that will hit him eventually.

Although this seems highly relevant, we never find out exactly why – Daniel doesn’t ask, and Rachel and her husband Robert (Kevin Hanchard) don’t tell – Allen spent the last three years living with another family. Daniel learns about this from the family’s sixteen-year-old, Lillian (Jessica Clement), who feels that Allen was her one true love.

Daniel also encounters another grieving father (Larry Day) at the cemetery where Allen is buried. This new character leads us into the really out-there aspects of where LONGING goes at about the fifty-minute mark.

To be clear, despite a few dream sequences and flights of fancy in which Daniel sees and communicates with Allen, there is nothing supernatural or surreal happening.

It’s just that Gere plays Daniel so straightforwardly and sincerely, with no outward evidence of eccentricity or egomaniacal bluster. We can’t tell whether the character has always been this insensitive to evidence, or whether he’s in such a state of shock and grief that it’s affected his judgment. The latter would be plausible (to an extent), but it’s unclear.

Then again, some of the other characters are fully as peculiar. There’s a scene that we can easily imagine being played for dark laughs, but it’s so naturalistic that it comes across as not so much funny as generally bizarre.

There is one sequence near the end where someone finally stands up to Daniel’s interpretation of his rights and his needs. This suggests that Daniel could really do with some personal readjustment, for his own sake and for that of those around him.

But then LONGING goes back to its singular perspective. We can tell we’re meant to be moved, but at least in the U.S./Canadian cultural context, it seems not only unusual, but possibly disrespectful of the dead.

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