This Can't Be Love

Early on we can virtually glimpse the "feel-good" (knock me over the # head) inevitable ending, but it's the all-too floral and busy music score that truly puts the boot in, completely sealing this film's fate. Here, moments from Katharine Hepburn's semi-fictionalised later life could have played more dramatic and tender, but are instead punctuated with jubilant wind instruments taking us by full-force into a tonally confused realm of lightheartedness. Any tension or depth is cut dead with an incessant noodling of notes which writes every plot development off as something purely whimsical. At one point, Hepburn's elderly character ends up in a jail cell and it's all laughs, apparently, from beginning to end. Some films can be too bleak - 'This Can't Be Love' suffers the reverse dilemma. A lot of wind and too much dismissed poignancy is largely the result of misguided music direction to an otherwise modest idea. I felt as if I could have vomited a flute or clarinet by the end of it.