Ivy Bettencourt (Emilia Clarke), the heroine of writer-director Drake Doremus‘ latest romantic navel-gazer, is a little bit of a mess.
We know this because the first time we see her, she’s oversleeping her alarm by so much that she barely makes her train — at which point she promptly spills coffee all over a handsome stranger, Edgar Ramírez’s Diego. We also know this because one of the next times we see her, she’s getting smashed at her goddaughter’s christening, having just reconnected with Noah (Jack Farthing), the ex-boyfriend and ex-boss who’d so recently broken her heart.
Next Life
The Bottom Line
Plenty of sugar but not enough flavor.
Venue: Tribeca Festival (Spotlight Narrative)
Cast: Emilia Clarke, Edgar Ramírez, Jack Farthing
Director-screenwriter: Drake Doremus
1 hour 52 minutes
This is a woman who doesn’t quite know what she wants, what she’s missing or how to find it. Premiering at Tribeca, Next Life tries to embrace her in all that uncertainty, giving her two entire realities in which to try things out or make mistakes and try again. But this Sliding Doors-style thought experiment is too tidy to provoke much feeling, rendering universal concepts like “fate” and “purpose” and “love” into abstractions rather than the stuff of life.
Ivy’s parallel realities branch at the point she enters the train, a few seconds later in one timeline than the other. In the first one, the coffee spill sparks an immediate flirtation with Diego, a jazz musician whose most strongly held principle is an antipathy to ever selling out. As it turns out, Ivy was a singer herself once, though she quit to pursue a more practical career in some undefined field that involves making phone calls and looking at spreadsheets.
In this timeline, Ivy gets seemingly everything she wants. She and Diego fall hard and fast for one another. She gets pregnant, and decides to keep it. She moves into his place, a giant exposed-brick studio that’s overflowing with plants and art and cozy blankets but has no doors or walls at all, not even for the bathroom. (Okay, so maybe she doesn’t get everything she wants.) With his encouragement, she even looks into restarting her music career.
In the other timeline, Ivy does not meet Diego on that train. Instead, she takes Noah back after his (frankly obnoxious) grand gesture of interrupting his own scripture reading at the christening to beg her for another chance. This Ivy also gets everything she wants, but they’re different things. She rejoins Noah’s company, crushing it at her weirdly unexplained job when they’re not hooking up in the supply closet. She moves into his place, a sleek glass-and-steel affair with bathroom walls and everything. They get engaged, start IVF, rediscover a mutual passion for jazz records.
In both timelines, Doremus deploys a handheld camera for long close-ups that, along with Dan Romer’s drippy score, suggest we’re supposed to find all of this terribly moving and breathlessly intimate. But his visions of love feel too exactingly curated, veering between photogenic scenes of cuddling and dancing in the streets and prettily sad ones of fighting (seemingly out of nowhere) or weeping over bad news. Missing are mundane moments, idiosyncratic details and slow-moving changes that actually comprise a long-term relationship. Without them, Next Life frequently plays like a dead-wife montage, or perhaps a for-your-consideration reel.
On that front: As a showcase for its leading trio, Next Life is flattering if not exactly revelatory. Ramírez gets to highlight his rugged sex appeal and a lovely singing voice as artsy Diego, while Farthing brings a welcome touch of sweetness to Noah the stuffy suit. And Clarke plays Ivy with enough laid-back charm (“I’m unemployed as well as single. A catch!” she quips while jokingly flipping her hair) that it’s easy to see why either might fall head over heels for her.
The problem is that upon closer examination, none of them quite feel like people. Take the contrast between their places (courtesy of production designer Elizabeth Mary Moore). Noah’s is so impersonal, devoid of even a single tchotchke, that it looks less like a home than a corporate apartment for visiting execs. It tells us only what type of guy he is (i.e., rich and kind of boring), not who he is as an individual. Diego’s is ostensibly more eclectic, a riot of colors and textures cramming every square inch of floor space. But none of it feels unique to him, either. It might as well be a composite of Pinterest boards tagged “bohemian studio apartment.”
In neither space is there any evidence at all of Ivy’s presence — no changes to the decor or layout once she moves in, no shelves cleared to make room for her own keepsakes or gadgets, not even any inconsiderate messes being left in the kitchen. It’s like she’s a paper doll, being dropped first into one generic backdrop and then another without leaving any trace in either.
Next Life is slightly more interesting as a rumination on artistic passion than on romantic love. As Diego sees it, true artists create because they have to — “because it’s inevitable” — and let nothing, not even personal insecurity or financial precarity, stop them. As Noah does, creation is an admirable pursuit if it makes one happy, but hardly an imperative for a fulfilling existence. The Ivies are in the middle, trying to figure out where her devotion to music fits in alongside her desires for kids, marriage or stability.
But as with Ivy’s relationships, the film is too nonspecific to take the question anywhere interesting, much less meaningful. Ivy cares about music because the script has decided she does, not for any reason we can feel in our own bones — just as with her goals of becoming a mother, or advancing in her undefined office job, or anything else. Doremus’ reflections on what makes a life well lived ought to feel universal and visceral, relevant as they are to every single human being who has ever existed. They might have hit harder, though, if the lives here felt truly lived at all.
