Forgotten Films

I'm With Lucy (2002)

When the world was going crazy for Gael Garcia Bernal after the releases of Amores Perros then The Motorcycle Diaries I'd wondered what all the fuss was suddenly about. I'd already seen his work in Y Tu Mama Tambien and before that, I'm With Lucy and knew he was someone to look out for. In Lucy, the terminally ignored actress Monica Potter plays the eponymous as she sets out on five blind dates with different men throughout a year, the twist being that right from the opening we know that she'll apparently be marrying one of them. Bernal is one of the prospective bows and the other four are John Hannah, Anthony LaPaglia, Henry Thomas and David Boreanaz (tv's Angel). This is the 21 Grams of romantic comedies, as the five dates are shown in parallel, cutting in between and throughout the year at vital moments, and as we get to know Lucy's likes and dislikes we begin to understand which of the men she'll eventually fall for.

The film missed a theatrical release in the uk and limped onto dvd a good three years after it appeared in the rest of the world. I originally saw it in Paris were it was selling out screens and the only reason I can think of that it didn't find a distributor in the uk is that it's very similar to the earlier Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Lawrence which also spun parallel love stories around Monica Potter but failed to find an audience here. Which is a shame, because like Nina Takes A Lover, which is also on this list, it's a bittersweet work that feeds the heart and the mind as its mysteries unfold. Thematically it's about not judging everything at face value - the first impression is not always the best impression - and that if you get to know someone you might discover that they're more or less compatible than you were expecting. Sympathetic.