But Savage also falls into the trap of making his movie become the thing it’s supposed to be depicting, and by the time we hit the hour-mark, a viewer might begin to feel almost as weighed down as Tara does. And make no mistake, she is weighed down, probably by depression, although nobody around her can recognize it as such and nobody’s interested in doing anything to constructively help her.

As she tells Mark about a group of French medieval tapestries she saw in an art book she bought in the center of London, Savage doesn’t even need to cut to a shot of Cooper to tell the audience about the eye roll we know his character is doing. Faced with such disdain and indifference, she walks out. 

And so she does, taking a train to Paris and finding the real tapestries where they hang. At the National Museum of the Middle Ages. There she sees them in person, and a handsome fellow struck by her gaze begins photographing her.

At this point, I almost wanted to bellow “No!” at the screen. I get that Tara is lonely but the solution of finding a "better" man is so very pat and expected. As it happens, the man she meets is not a savior and their encounter points out to Tara that her situation has more complexities than her misery allows her to count.

The movie is mainly noteworthy as a showcase for Arterton. The one-time Bond Girl (surely you remember her in “Quantum of Solace” in the role of … don’t make me say it … Strawberry Fields) is thoroughly deglamorized here, wearing little makeup and wearing ordinary clothes. Her character too is, while intelligent and full of profound yearning, not someone who can articulate her feelings in dazzling verbal flights. Tara is a role that she has to inhabit without flash, and Arterton does so, and movingly, in every frame in which she appears. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55llaiworzEZmlpaWg%3D