Young Werther 2024
Sinopsis
Charming, passionate, totally irresponsible young novelist Werther is sent to the city on an errand by his mother. By chance, he meets lovely Charlotte, whose allure and commitment to her impressive, stable fiancé Albert will turn Werther’s life upside down. Werther and Charlotte embark on an emotional affair, while Werther and Albert start an awkward friendship. The more entwined this trio becomes, the harder it is to navigate the complexities of lust, affinity, and love.
Cast
- Douglas Booth as Werther
- Alison Pill as Charlotte
- Iris Apatow as Sissy
- Patrick J. Adams as Albert
- Amrit Kaur as Melanie
Review
There is a boisterously nimble quality to the way in which Douglas Booth plays the titular character of “Young Werther.”
With hair perpetually coifed, Werther has the look of an uppity trust-fund kid, but Booth plays him more like a dandy mixed with a golden retriever, transported from another era yet born yesterday.His interpretation bridges a kind of spiritual gap between the 18th-century German novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that the film is based on and the modern Toronto milieu that this charming adaptation takes place in. The movie, written and directed by José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço, focuses on the trials of Werther, an idealistic young man caught in a love triangle. After meeting and falling in love with Charlotte (Alison Pill), a woman he spends a whirlwind night with at a party, Werther is stunned to hear that she’s already engaged. Charlotte’s fiancé, Albert (Patrick J. Adams), is stable and sweet, but he doesn’t make time for her. Werther, on the other hand, is a romantic adventure.
He is all jokes and jolly energy, an irresistible foil to Charlotte’s typically constricted outlook. Booth and Pill make for a pair worth rooting for, but it’s Booth in particular, just barely but believably not of this world, who lends the film its winning sensibility.
He’s helped by the film’s warmly pleasing focus, where the edges of the frame blur around the central characters, often Werther and Charlotte laughing and falling for one another. It’s as if we’re looking through a telescope, a representation of both the tunnel vision of love and also of a tragic romance of centuries past.
