The Map That Leads To You review
Cast: Madelyn Cline, KJ Apa, Sofia Wylie, Madison Thompson, Josh Lucas, Orlando Norman
Director: Lasse Hallström
Star rating: ★★★
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise is such a seminal work that any other film that promises a whiff of romance during a trip gets compared to it. But there’s still a lot of charm and poise to the new Amazon Prime Video entry, The Map That Leads To You, to ground its own travel-coded romance.
The premise
Adapted from a novel by J.P. Monninger, the film centres on the whirlwind romance between two strangers- Heather (Madelyn Cline) is obsessed with planning things out based on her itinerary, while Jack (KJ Apa) is the vagabond who lives in the moment. They are unfamiliar with what comes next, although we know exactly where it’s headed. This predictability gives the film a sugary, glossy rush.
Heather meets Jack first on a midnight train to Barcelona. He heads up to the rack that is used for keeping luggage to get some sleep, while she and her friends Connie (Sofia Wylie) and Amy (Madison Thompson) sit just below. Coincidentally, both Heather and Jack find out that they are reading Ernest Hemingway’s Spain-set novel The Sun Also Rises, which becomes the starting point for their bond.
What works
As one would expect, there is an instant spark as the two meet again at a Barcelona club. Jack shares that he is tracing all the places through Europe, following his grandfather’s journal. This journal acts as the map to discover various locations that he had visited in post-World War II Europe. This sets the tone of this breezy, gorgeously shot film that quickly treads towards the predictable territory of a tragedy waiting in store.
Even as what follows between Jack and Heather is winsome and believable in its obliviousness, the film somehow fails to give their love story additional depth. Heather remains the focus; her concerns and impulses are entirely believable, yet she is somehow removed in the scenes where she is with Jack. He is the mysterious type, the man who would run away the moment an emotional confrontation occurs.
Final thoughts
As much as I loved their meet-cute vacation romance, the adaptation falls short in exploring the precariousness and jest of young adulthood, or what it means to love someone so far removed from everything else. The film lacks texture, which it tends to overcompensate for in capturing the scenic views of the Spanish landscape. It also avoids a crucial sense of perspective. The roads that lead the two to connect and differ are never fully explored as the film rushes to tick the same beats of a romance nearing a tragic outcome. There are flashbacks of Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha in the later scenes, even as the proceedings stay acutely safe and glossy till the very end.
It is Madelyn Cline who makes the most of Heather, even when the film allows her not much to do in the breadth of the frame. She brings in a much-needed fragility beneath the pragmatic exterior and infuses the film with a lot of texture and confidence. KJ Apa is in fine form, and together, their chemistry eases out the meandering issues of the film. By the end, you would want to see more of her left alone, deliberating what to do, what to avoid. She must see the present moment first, and then try to make sense of it.
