Within its first few minutes, Rachel Morrison’s “Love of Your Life” has all the setups of a romantic comedy: Maya and Charlie meet cute when she buys a small desk from him with a stuck drawer; some mild flirtation takes place; Maya drags the desk home, unsticks the drawer, discovers a cassette tape and sticks it in her Walkman and is intrigued by the atmospheric music.
Note: This is taking place in 2020. Charlie still saves cassette tapes, and Maya still has a cassette Walkman. Could a romance be far off?
Well, no, it couldn’t. But that’s pretty much the last rom-commy thing that happens in “Love of Your Life,” which jumps into the relationship so quickly that you can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding that lurks beneath the perfect romance. And sure enough, the film spends most of its time dealing with the aftermath of loss and the slow process of rebuilding a person wracked with grief. It’s not a rom-com; it’s a tragedy in which the lead character isn’t sure whether to surrender to that tragedy or try to recover from it.
Morrison, the first woman every nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, made her directorial debut with “The Fire Inside” in 2024. Her followup is gentler and more disquieting; she’s skilled at capturing the rhapsodic moments in a life, but then backing off from the rhapsody. “Love of Your Life” shows us beauty and then suggests that we don’t trust it.
Maya is played by Margaret Qualley with a light touch through the opening stretch of the film as her relationship with Charlie (Gabriel Basso) blossoms, and then with a heavy burden as COVID arrives and we find out why their first bout of lovemaking was interrupted by Charlie running for his asthma inhaler.
The film is separated into chapters based on Maya’s age: 26 and 27 during the Charlie phase, then a jump to 31 when she’s on her own in Lisbon, a young widow who spends her time smoking and drinking and having apparently indiscriminate sex.
“It’s amazing how much you can talk about your dead husband and people still want to sleep with you,” she tells Felix (Aaron Pierre), a Londoner who asks her out for a drink. And when Felix asks her what she’s going to do when she finishes distracting herself, her answer comes quickly: “I don’t know. Kill myself?”
The film sinks deeply into Maya’s grief, but it takes its time cycling through different ways of dealing with loss: dwelling on it, distracting yourself from it, embracing occasional moments of connection with new people while desperately avoiding any connections with old friends.
At times, it feels as if the movie is pushing Maya toward healing, so adept are Morrison and cinematographer Todd Banhazl at finding and highlighting moments of beauty and hope. But even in the midst of sweet times or romantic montages with a new boyfriend, Qualley stubbornly refuses to fully mend; her grief is seldom far away, and she chooses to respond by becoming hard and distant.
“They say you can’t run away from your life,” she says at one point. “But you can. It just makes you a monster.”
In a way, “Love of Your Life” is a character study of a monster, except that Qualley and Morrison refuse to make it that simple, or to give up hope as fully as Maya sometimes seems to have done. It feels schizophrenic at times, enamored of joyous moments but undercutting the pleasure with pain.
But it also suggests that there’s a reason for the film, and the life it depicts, to feel scattered: Grief is a complex thing, and you have to deal with whatever it throws at you.
Amazon MGM Studios will release “Love of Your Life” in theaters on Oct. 7 and on Prime Video on Oct. 14.
