Film Review: Supernova (2021)
Stanley Tucci (left) and Colin Firth (right) star in SUPERNOVA, written and directed byHarry Macqueen. Credit: Bleecker Street
Watching the trailer for this beautifully wrought portrait of a relationship had me in floods of tears. The couple are Sam (Colin Firth), a concert pianist, and Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a writer.
They have been together for 20 years and are on a trip through England’s Lake District in an RV. Sam will be performing in a concert and they will be visiting Sam’s sister for a reunion with old friends along the way. The yin and yang of the finely tuned compatibility between the incisive American wordsmith and the taciturn British musician is evident in all of their interactions with one another. It is sensitively rendered in the way that they sleep together in a spooning embrace which is way beyond passion. They are almost one person.
Colin Firth (left) and Stanley Tucci (right) star in SUPERNOVA, written and directed byHarry Macqueen. Credit: Bleecker Street
What is gradually revealed in their conversation and an incident while on the journey is the fact that this will be their last trip and Tusker’s acknowledgement that he is losing more and more of his faculties due to early onset dementia, a fact that he has been vainly trying to deny. The intense intimacy of close-up scenes between the two men inside the car shifts deftly to long swooping shots of the ravishing countryside they are travelling through. The days spent with Lily (Pippa Haywood) in Sam’s childhood home serve to fill in details of the two men’s lives through memories from the friends and family. Everyone tiptoes around the subject which is known but not mentioned.
Stanley Tucci (left) and Colin Firth (right) star in SUPERNOVA, written and directed byHarry Macqueen. Credit: Bleecker Street
To his great credit MacQueen carefully steers clear of anything close to sentimentality. In the same way that the camera retreats to the country vistas on the journey, he reveals the final plans that Tusker has made for himself without telling Sam. Sam’s discovery of them and the confrontation which ensues are without emotional histrionics. These two skilled actors can do more with their eyes and gestures than hundreds of words. And your heart will be broken by Sam’s initial doubt as to whether he can go through with his commitment to the ending which he had imagined and finally accepted, only to have Tusker insist he do something else out of love. Sam’s struggle is palpable and his is surely the greater pain. MacQueen spares us the potentially draining details and lets us go knowing that the right thing has been done. The details are not necessary. The profundity of the loss is what matters and that is manifestly realized. (Available on Youtube)
