Direction: Harry Macqueen
Country: UK
Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci star in Harry Macqueen’s Supernova as lifelong gay partners, whose lives take a gradual painful change after an early manifestation of dementia affecting one of them.
As Tusker (Tucci), a writer, sees a considerable increase in his dementia symptoms, Sam (Firth), his 20-year partner, proposes a road trip across England with final stop at Lake District to reunite with relatives. Naturally, Sam wants to spend every minute left with Tusker, but his deep concern and anguish toward the situation leads to an inability to fully enjoy every moment. So much that Tusker feels like he’s being mourned while still alive.
Things get really complex when suicide comes to the table. More than anything, Tusker wants to be remembered for the person he was and not for the one he’s about become.
Although the intimate story aches empathy, the film’s less than favorable results are compromised by the super controlled proceedings. The tone is ponderous, the dialogue not so ripe, and the pace reveals a torpor that hampers this drama from going beyond the expected.
Macqueen (Hinterland, 2014) takes a crack at avoiding unnecessary sentimentality, which is understandable, but a tale of this nature requires to pull out a touching stimulus of any kind not to get diluted in pure banality. If only the narrative were as gripping as Tucci’s performance, the film would have offered that stellar explosion that the title suggests. Instead, it just scintillates with an irregular cadence until the lights go completely off and we simply forget it.
