Say Anything...

As an almost 17 year old, today was my first time seeing it and wow! Diane's style was a huge hit or huge miss but that's hardly a way to rate a film. Really powerful performance by John Mahoney. Great lighting! But most importantly, the characters acted like subtle teens but there was all the magic of a movie.

Some romantic films age badly because they are too closely tied to their period. Say Anything belongs to the opposite group. It is unmistakably a late-1980s film, yet it still works because it understands something timeless: the mixture of excitement, fear, awkwardness and courage involved in truly falling in love.John Cusack is perfect as Lloyd Dobler. He is not the popular boy, a conventional winner or somebody with his entire future planned. He is still trying to discover who he is, but he knows exactly how he feels about Diane. That honesty makes him one of the great romantic characters of the period.Ione Skye is equally wonderful. Diane could have been merely the beautiful, brilliant and unreachable girl desired by the protagonist, but the film gives her much more. She is intelligent, sensitive and uncertain, caught between the life she wants and the influence of a father she admires too deeply to see clearly.Their relationship works because it never feels like a perfect fantasy. Lloyd is far more certain about his feelings than Diane. She moves forward, pulls away, allows herself to enjoy the relationship and then becomes frightened. He may be intense, but he always remains human. The film understands that two people do not necessarily reach the same emotional place at the same time.Cameron Crowe writes young people without treating them as fools. Their conversations contain humour, nerves, silences and the desire to appear more mature than they really are. He also writes the adults with unusual care. Diane’s father is not simply an obstacle, but someone loving, complicated and controlling at once.That family conflict gives the film more weight than a conventional romantic comedy. Diane must not only decide how she feels about Lloyd. She must also recognise how much of her life has been built around her image of her father, and what happens when that image begins to collapse.Cusack makes Lloyd funny, romantic and vulnerable without becoming sentimental. There is something very authentic in the way he persists, makes mistakes and suddenly has no idea what to do when events stop going according to plan.Then there is the boombox scene. It has become part of cinematic memory, even for people who have never seen the whole film. Lloyd standing beneath the window with “In Your Eyes” playing is one of the most famous romantic images in cinema. It works because it is not merely a beautiful shot: it arrives when he no longer knows how else to express what he **** is also fascinating to see so many supporting actors who would become major Hollywood names only a few years later. Many appear in small roles, but they help create the sense that Lloyd and Diane live in a real world surrounded by friends, relatives and classmates with personalities of their **** film is funny without needing to humiliate its characters. There are awkward situations, ridiculous conversations and several genuinely comic moments, yet it always treats everyone with affection. Even when people make mistakes, the film tries to understand them.Some details clearly belong to the period. Communication, expectations about the future and certain romantic codes have changed considerably. The central emotion, however, remains untouched: loving somebody while still having no idea what to do with your own **** Anything is about first love, but also growing up, questioning certainty and discovering that adults may be just as lost as young people. It has unforgettable scenes, two magnificent leads and a sensitivity that many later romantic comedies tried to imitate without matching.A late-1980s classic and an exceptional film.