Love You Not I Love You I Movie Review

For 19 hours between August 25, 1994, and January 26, 1995, Claire Danes had the role of a lifetime. As moody Angela Chase in My So-Called Life, she created a role so on target that those 19 hours are still played constantly on MTV and they even received their own video release in 1998. Since 1995, Danes has kept busy onscreen, but is mainly a “cool teen” star on magazine covers with yucky hair styles and clothes that stubbornly refuse to become pace-setting fashions. Danes began well as Beth in 1994's Little Women, then played bits in How to Make an American Quilt and Home for the Holidays. The weepy To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday followed and then William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which attained hit status largely because Romeo was Leonardo DiCaprio. U-Turn was barely released, her role in John Grisham's The Rainmaker was wimpy and unpersuasive, and she was lost in the large cast of Les Miserables. And then there is I Love You, I Love You Not, which might have looked terrific in the planning stages before it required the participation of investors in four different countries only to wind up as a straight-to-video release in America after a short run in a few European theatres. Danes is Daisy, a Manhattan schoolgirl who loves Ethan (Jude Law), but he doesn't love her back because she's Jewish. (James Van Der Beek is Tony, another classmate who's mean to Daisy for the same reason.) Danes also plays her Nana (Jeanne Moreau) as a young girl, who survived Auschwitz OFF-SCREEN. This movie seems unfinished and disjointed as it's missing all the elements that would make it affecting and real. It feels like they shot footage, raised money, shot footage, raised money, ad infinitum. Somewhere in the process, the whole point of the movie got lost. Do we believe that Daisy and Nana are related? Not for a second. What made My So-Called Life work so well was the fact that the writers knew Angela Chase inside and out and spent a lot of time and care ensuring that she looked and sounded just right. Now Claire Danes is on a career track with jobs that look impressive on her resume, but are not specifically good for her. She's way too young to be the McLean Stevenson of the 1990s, but her career needs a lot more thought and considerably more focus than she and/or her advisers are giving it.

1997 (PG-13) 92m/C FR GE GB Claire Danes, Jeanne Moreau, Jude Law, James Van Der Beek, Robert Sean Leonard, Kris Park, Lauren Fox, Emily Burkes-Nossiter, Carrie Slaza; D: Billy Hopkins; W: Wendy Kesselman; C: Maryse Alberti; M: Gil Goldstein. VHS, Closed Caption