Longing: Richard Gere Experiences Ex-Paternity in Lifeless Adaptation of an Israeli Film Fest Favourite
By Liz Braun
Rating: B-minus
Longing is a remake of a successful 2017 Israeli film. This version has a strong cast that includes Richard Gere and Diane Kruger, so there’s really no excuse for how lifeless an undertaking it proves to be.
Whatever magic that writer/director Savi Gabizon brought to the original seems to have evaporated for this second go.
The story concerns a man who discovers late in life that he has a son he never knew about. Thereafter, his life takes some very odd turns.
Richard Gere discovers the dead son he never knew he had in Longing.
Gere stars as Daniel Bloch, and the film opens as he meets up with Rachel (Suzanne Clément), a former girlfriend he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Rachel breaks the news to Daniel that they have a 19-year-old son together, a child she never told Daniel about because she knew he didn’t want kids.
After they broke up all those years ago, she returned to Canada, discovered she was pregnant, and decided to raise the boy alone.
Daniel has barely adjusted to the news when the other shoe drops: the son, Allen, has recently died in a car crash.
“I wanted you to know you were a father,” says Rachel, although some will feel she chose an odd time to let Daniel know. After this revelation, Daniel gazes into the middle distance and looks pensive, as if contemplating his great loss. But as you can’t miss what you never had, it all seems vaguely dishonest.
Our newly minted father gets on a plane to Canada to attend a memorial service for Allen in Hamilton, Ontario. (The movie was filmed there and in Kitchener and Cambridge.) Nobody else turns up for the service, and Daniel discovers that Rachel isn’t there because she has been hospitalized for something.
While he’s in town, Daniel meets Mikey (Wayne Burns), who claims he was Allen’s best friend. Together, Mikey and Allen bought some marijuana to sell, but the dope was in the car in which Allen died, and now the best friend needs $5k immediately to pay the dealer.
So, was Allen a bad kid? By the time the friend describes how Allen had one leg shorter than the other and hence played no sports, the proceedings seem bleak and surreal. And there's more: Allen was expelled for writing on the side of a school building — a rude message, says the principal.
No, that’s a love poem, says the devoted Daniel.
By the time he encounters Alice (Kruger), the beautiful if low-affect teacher with whom Allen was obsessed, Longing has become fully strange and slightly boring.
And this is before Daniel decides that a stranger’s dead daughter — a redhead buried near Allen’s grave — and Allen should be married.
It’s a tough slog to get through Longing. You’ll wonder if the film concerns Daniel’s pride over his newly discovered fatherhood rather than Allen’s brief existence; Allen’s life does not exist except in the way it is interpreted and remembered by other people, which seems important.
Or maybe not.
The original Longing opened Venice Days at Venice 2017, where it won the BNL People’s Choice Award.
Longing: written and directed by Savi Gabizon, starring Richard Gere, Diane Kruger and Suzanne Clement. Film opens in theatres in Toronto (Varsity) and Vancouver (Fifth Avenue) June 7, in Montreal June 14 and in other cities across Canada over the summer.