Winter Spring Summer or Fall
Winter Spring Summer or Fall, directed by Tiffany Paulsen, is a romantic drama that rarely comes without good intentions. Such films tend to be easy to consume disposable but not toxic. They’re designed either to feel familiar or to show us a fantastical version of what love and lust “could” be if relationships were meant to unfold cinematically. This kind of film already overpopulates 2024’s release calendar. From The Idea of You and Música to The Greatest Hits and Players, every one of those four titles belongs to a streamer.
Perhaps this is an indicator of Winter Spring Summer or Fall’s fate before we note that it’s headlined by Netflix queen Jenna Ortega in what can only be described as an empty role. Ortega plays Remi, who is closer to a lab creation than a character, she has just completed a fellowship at Google, has never partied and is debating between attending Columbia and Harvard after high school (both are safety schools). While on the train en route to a tour at the former Ivy, she meets Barnes Hayworth (Percy Hynes White, Ortega’s Wednesday co-star); Barnes’ name was generated by an AI software masquerading as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal library, he doesn’t want to go to college, is a soulful tortured stoner lookalike and represents danger for all things educational.
The makings of their will they won’t they aren’t any more original despite the natural chemistry Ortega and Hynes White have evidently built up over a few years as screen partners. This New Jersey Transit meet-cute (as infuriating as it sounds) begins thanks to Barnes’ familiarity with Remi because his best friend PJ (Elias Kacavas) lives across the street from Remi’s family. Barnes tries to penetrate her steely facade by making her a playlist solely featuring the tunes of the Talking Heads, as 18 year olds are wont to do. After Barnes directs Remi to an express train instead of a local, she lightens up a touch, and an acquaintance ship is born. But she has “a lot of important things going on” that she won’t neglect for “some cute guy I met on a train.” Cannot compute.
Until it does. Why else do we watch? In the span of what the film’s synopsis calls “four days” but should probably be more like four seasons, these two fall in love. They listen to David Byrne and Buffalo Tom as they gaze longingly into each other’s eyes because even though they’re played by actors in their early 20s, they’re supposed to be teenagers and dream about saving sea turtles in Costa Rica. (Seriously.) And yet for how much these stars connect with each other on screen, Winter Spring Summer or Fall never feels convincing and rarely even real. Its script, by Rizzoli & Isles writer Dan Schoffer, is clunky and formulaic, populated by supporting characters like Adam Rodriguez’s “Dad” and Marisol Nichols’ “Mom” who are so forgettable they might as well be nameless.
Winter Spring Summer or Fall clearly takes its cues from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, but Paulsen and Schoffer’s right place wrong time story lacks the lived in quality that made those films such milestones of cinema. It’s not that having influences for an original film is a bad thing; it’s when those references become such a scaffolding around your work that you can’t help but come off worse by comparison to everything the earlier movie did better than you did them that you run into problems. Ortega and Hynes White can’t exactly be blamed for failing to live up to Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, Winter Spring Summer or Fall is entirely at fault for trying to stuff Sunrise, Sunset, and Midnight into one YA weepy.
While it will likely win the title of cheesiest movie with the most mainstream appeal at a major festival this year hands down Winter Spring Summer or Fall wears its heart on its sleeve like few movies I’ve seen it also falls victim to an age old problem. When a boring romance happens in the content forest, and there’s no one around to see it, does it make a sound? And once it lands on whatever Paramount+ is supposed to be by the time this movie comes out, will Ortega fans really pay up for a film that’s more likely to inspire fan edits on TikTok than it is a future sequel from Colleen Hoover’s production company? (Derogatory.) The film’s only saving grace is its ending not because of any twist or weirdness or even originality in how things wrap up, but rather because we don’t have to watch this love affair play out any longer. It was always a road to nowhere, nobody will blame you for not wanting to tag along.
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