Note: Major spoilers ahead for “Love of Your Life”
“Love of Your Life” is now streaming on Prime Video, and it takes a pretty devastating twist in its love story. It was a “meaningful” one to director Rachel Morrison though, who was determined to handle it just right.
The film, written by Julia Cox, stars Margaret Qualley as Maya, an ER nurse. One day, while picking up a table she bought over social media, she meets Charlie (Gabriel Basso), and quickly figures out that he’s the love of her life. The feeling is mutual, and the two fall hard. She even becomes the first girl he’s taken home to meet his family.
Eventually they get married, and are living a pretty happy life. That is, until — this is your last spoiler warning — COVID hits. Charlie has asthma, and heartbreakingly becomes one of the many immunocompromised who died from the virus, despite the care Maya was able to provide.
It’s a deeply realistic portrayal of the height of the pandemic, complete with scenes of Charlie having to wipe down their groceries before putting them away, and it’s moments like that that mattered most to Morrison.
“There’s a bit of a shock factor both when it happens in the film … but also that it takes you right back, and so it feels it feels apocalyptic,” she told TheWrap. “It feels life and death. It brings us all back to this really high stakes and pivotal moment in our lives. But for me, it was really just about getting the details right.”
To do that, Morrison and Qualley spoke to medical consultants and first responders, to really get into the nitty gritty. According to the director, it paid off.
“One person came up to me after the screening at TIFF and said she had lost her her aunt and uncle within three months of each other during the pandemic, and that it felt like people were treating them like statistics,” Morrison recalled. “The film, in bringing so much vitality to Charlie, it gave them their lives back. It made them real people, and she was really grateful for that.”
The director surmised that, thus far, films haven’t tackled the pandemic in this way, in part because “people just weren’t ready.” That said, Morrison didn’t set out to make a COVID movie. Most important to the director was telling a real, grounded story about love, loss and friendship.
The title “Love of Your Life” takes on multiple meanings in this film, as Maya not only finds the love of her life — possibly even two — but also learns how to keep having a love of her own life, and the people who are still in it, romantic or not.
“I also do think there’s something really interesting about this idea that like timing plays a big part of it, and circumstance plays a big part of it, and maybe there’s another soulmate down the line for a different time in your life,” she detailed. “So I thought it was all kind of worth exploring.”
It helped having a lead as strong as Qualley, who helped bring the complexity of a character like Maya to life. Following the death of Charlie, Maya really runs away from her life, making some questionable choices as she struggles to process her grief. That process is precisely why Morrison tackled this movie.
“I think maybe we’re ready to do some processing and to acknowledge that grief isn’t something that you bounce back from the next day, like in so many films, you know?” she said. “And a broken heart isn’t something that you bounce back from right away either. And so, getting to kind of take our time with it and be kind of real and relatable, that’s my hope for this film, is that people feel a little more seen in whatever their journeys are.”
“Love of Your Life” is now streaming on Prime Video.
