The ongoing digital revolution that has placed the means of film production into the hands of budding indie directors everywhere stutters somewhat with the release of British director Justin Hardy’s Love Me Till Monday (2013). A painful 89 minutes of banality and boredom ensues in this misfiring attempt at understanding the contemporary experience of lowly university graduates working in McJobs while searching through one night stands for any vague semblance of a meaningful relationship. The film’s synopsis outlines a group of twentysomethings who, while on the look out for love, “dance ironically in circles, drink far too much and snog a friend…they eat cheesy chips or cold quiche at 3am.”
What we’re told they should be doing instead is “waking romantically along the Seine in perfectly cut trench coats or holding tightly to a handsome man on the back of a Vespa.” Love Me Till Monday’s promotional blurb then goes on to describe itself as lying somewhere between “Downton and TOWIE, ASBO and PhD and the city and the countryside.” Despite these lofty claims, the idea of dreamy, out-of-place post-university students who consider themselves better and more interesting than their working-class colleagues in an office in Reading (situated just twenty-odd miles away from The Office’s Wernham Hogg paper merchants) has been done before on numerous occasions with far greater humour, pathos and style than is offered up by Hardy’s muddled and frustratingly inconsistent debut feature.
A sole positive comes with the performance of Georgia Maguire as Becky, our love-lorn heroine who works in a job she hates and seems to have no friends apart from one-dimensional work colleagues that resemble unglamourous cast-off from Hollyoaks. Her mother has left her looking after her autistic brother, who she treats pretty poorly. She pines after an office co-worker and then ends up in a pseudo-relationship with her boss. As for Maguire’s fellow cast members, none of them are truly believable as human beings let alone representations of their characters. Ultimately, Hardy’s often baffling Love Me Till Monday has precious little to say about twentysomething malaise, sex or relationships in the 21st century.
D.W. Mault
