Even among friends, he talks over her with patronising aplomb and treats her as little more than a trinket. Her marriage with Lawrence (Joe Alwyn), a gregarious but cold industrialist, is an entirely formal arrangement with little genuine affection on either side. All the best stuff begins on the face of Shailene Woodley as Jennifer Stirling, a married, unhappy socialite in 1965, who is “J”, recipient of the letters and respondent to her mystery beau over several anxious, palpitating months. So far, so three stars – not that there’s anything particularly amiss with Jones or Rizwan (Informer, Industry), who have gawky but cute chemistry, and prove an appealing match by the end. In the process, she buddies up with their stiff custodian, Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan), who turns from her jobsworth nemesis into a cuddly fellow detective. Jones plays an unattached reporter for “The London Chronicle” who stumbles across the first of many billets-doux in the newspaper’s absurdly palatial archives. The script, by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding, toggles between the heartbreak of a will-they-won’t-they amour fou in the Sixties sections, and a relatively workaday framing story, the nagging banality of which only throws the lessons of the past into more dazzling relief. The Last Letter from Your Lover is all redemptive passion, second chances granted after half a lifetime, and radiates an earnest conviction that love can be transformative, whether it sets you free from a stiflingly conventional marriage or just loosens you up to feel something. I can’t argue that the film, derived from a 2008 Jojo Moyes bestseller, skirts the clichés of the format or in any way reinvents them, but it’s a thousand times better than the last Moyes adaptation to reach the screen, 2016’s disability-themed clunker Me Before You, which hinged on the gritted-teeth-emoji of an idea that life in a wheelchair was not worth living. You get a spectacularly well-dressed Sixties love affair playing out in intense, epistolary fashion, while Felicity Jones (as an improbable modern-day journalist) scurries around trying to make sense of it. If there’s a chink in your emotional armour, there’s simply no resisting what this film has to offer. Hardened cynics may be forced to scoff at The Last Letter from Your Lover, perhaps the most unabashedly tearjerking romance since The Notebook, rather than face confessing that it works unusually well.
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