“The Unexpected Love (or the least likely love, adapted to Flashback by French distributors) is a film that is likely too little ambitious in its subject – the fading love in a couple in their fifties and the temptation of a new life – as well as its smooth, unassuming direction that doesn’t assert itself clearly as either a true comedy or, conversely, a psychological dissection of love, à la Bergman or Woody Allen.
Juan Vera indeed makes the surprising choice of not choosing: between a moral comedy that shamelessly winks at its 40-50-year-old audience, who will easily recognize themselves in these harmless clichés about the wear and tear of a relationship and the futility of seduction in the era of Tinder, and a cold analysis of modern disarray in an increasingly incomprehensible world.
Moreover, it is surprising to see how the screenplay ventures into a real labyrinth of subplots, situations that it often simply abandons without resolution in the course of very convenient time lapses: it’s as if Vera were afraid to delve into the true depths of his subject, where something genuinely gripping, even disturbing, could occur…
For, of course, Ricardo Darín is, as always, enchanting, at once a biting caricature of the typical male of his generation and a human being quivering with truth, an actor combining a powerful singularity with perfect accuracy of interpretation.
With him, we will delight in a happy ending all the more fragile as it was programmatically announced by the title: with him, we can truly believe in this pretty– and light – final declaration of non-love, a disenchanted but not so sad acknowledgment of the twists and turns that life takes.”
