Love And Other Impossible Pursuits review

review by Sav Kobresia

With a soundtrack featuring Adele and the Flaming Lips, this Natalie Portman / Lisa Kudrow film is a look at grief and redemption that feels sad, sweet poetic and very real...

Based on the novel by Ayelet Waldmanm, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Also known by the film title “The Other Woman”) is nothing short of an extraordinary film.

Emelia (Natalie Portman) is a recently-married law school graduate. Her story begins with an affair with her unhappily married boss. As flirtation leads to a full-blown affair, the married boss Jack (Scott Cohen) divorces his wife to marry Emilia, who is several weeks pregnant.

Their happiness is short lived, however, as Emilia and Jack soon suffer the loss of their infant daughter, Isabel. Struggling with grief, Emilia reaches out to her stepson, William (Charlie Tahan), a belligerent child trained by his mother Carolyn (Lisa Kudrow) to have a sharp tongue and little patience for his new stepmother. It is up to Emilia to see if she can coax William out of his protective shell.

In the midst of this, Carolyn continues in her pursuit of turning her son against his stepmother in stating that Isabel “was never really a person, because according to Jewish law a baby must live eight days to be a person, and Isabel only lived three...”

The film has a soft, sensitive soundtrack featuring The Flaming Lips, Adele, and several instrumental pieces. Both sweet and sad, and intensely real, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is ripe with raw emotion, angst, and is deeply poetic as it is tragic. It is a film about a woman, lost in a world of chaos and grief who finally finds where in the world she belongs through the people she loves. Having enjoyed the film, I can’t wait to read the book...

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