Howard (James Cosmo) is a grizzled former sea captain spending his twilight years alone doddering around his house on the Irish coast and generally not taking care of himself or his house. When his frazzled daughter Grace (Catherine Walker) visits for his birthday and finds flies buzzing around last week’s (month’s? year’s?) dirty dishes on the table and his underwear soaking in rust-colored water in the kitchen sink, she sets out to hire a housekeeper. Enter Annie (Brid Brennan), a sweet older woman who takes the job, and Howard is none too pleased. The old crank chases her off, but quickly realizing the error of his ways, he begs for her return. Slowly she starts to see Howard’s sweet side peek through his cantankerous façade, first with the mischievous glint in his eyes as he interacts with her grandchildren at the local pub, and soon toward her, and the pair quickly fall head over heels in love.
My Sailor, My Love is saddled with a title that makes it sound cloying, but nothing could be further from the truth. The whirlwind romance between Howard and Annie is so, so sweet, but it also feels so, so real due to the nuanced, grounded performances of Cosmo and Brennan. Director Klaus Härö (who has had four of his eight feature films chosen to represent his native Finland for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars) lets the camera linger over his actors, and whole lifetimes are captured in their silences.
Härö’s lens captures a rural island that is beautiful but not over-the-top idyllic, its verdant greens muted by the constantly overcast skies. Howard’s home feels realistically lived-in both before and after Annie applies a woman’s touch to it, its cramped rooms and tight hallways feeling like a house that a family truly ran through its paces.
Conflict invades this fairytale romance in the form of Grace. To say that she has stress in her life is an understatement: her husband is threatening to leave her, he’s forcing her to attend group therapy sessions whose touchy-feely granola aesthetic really rubs her the wrong way, she works endless hours as a nurse caring for the dying, her mother died in a tragic accident, and her relationship with her father was fraught (to put it mildly) well before her mother passed and her brothers moved away to leave her as her father’s caretaker. She is at her wit’s end when she brings Annie into her father’s life, and when she sees the way he is with Annie’s family—a way he never was to his own family—it’s all just too much to bear. In some ways, Grace knows Howard better than anyone. But does that mean that she sees through him, that his lovable grandpa shtick is just an act? Or has Annie really changed him for the better and she just can’t accept it?
The Grace/Howard relationship is where My Sailor, My Love draws most of its drama, and also where it falters ever so slightly, minor twists in the narrative that require the characters be needlessly cruel or silent when they shouldn’t be just to keep the plot going. Even when the plot occasionally stumbles, the actors are always right there to right the ship. Walker gets the heaviest load in that regard, the most instances of actions that can feel a little arbitrary, yet she sells it because she really nails that feeling of emotional overload in her performance: the furrowed brow, the quavering eyes, the nervous pauses before speaking her mind. She’s not hysterical, she’s exhausted, and that comes through crystal clear. The role of Howard also asks much of Cosmo, shifting suddenly from cuddly teddy bear to stone-faced cruelty, while Brennan shines as Annie, capturing on her face the internal struggle between absorbing Grace’s accusations about Howard and accepting that he is the man he seems to be. Composer and pianist Michelino Bisceglia’s score is the perfect supporting player, utilizing melancholy piano and swelling strings to amplify the heartbreak.
My Sailor, My Love foregrounds its November-December romance, but it’s ultimately a story about fathers and daughters and unspoken family tensions finally exploding to the surface. That tension doesn’t always feel earned, but the central story of finding love late in life has more than enough charm to make the delightful My Sailor, My Love worth a watch. | Jason Green
My Sailor, My Love is available on VOD starting October 24. For more information, visit the film’s official website or watch the trailer below.
