Movie Review: Love Gets a Room

© Nostromo Pictures

Love Gets a Room is an effective “real-time” movie where drama and reality blend into one.
by Jeremy Fogelman

Cast: Clara Rugaard, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Mark Ryder, Anastasia Hille, Magnus Krepper, Adventure, Drama, Musical
Rating: ★★★

In general I would say I have a high bar for Holocaust movies, given the touchy nature of the topic, and the extreme sensitivities related to it that are sadly still relevant today. Any time you’re trying to do something a bit different, it’s immediately a potential risk, even if that means it’s more likely to stand out from the typical dire sorts of common ones. In a similar vein, movies running in “real time” are pretty uncommon and difficult to pace effectively -- but there’s an interesting conceit that can pair these two concepts together.

Love Gets a Room comes from Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés and is co-writtten with David Safier, heavily borrowing from the original Love Gets a Room musical comedy written by Polish playwright Jerzy Jurandot (who passed in 1979, born in 1911 -- he was from Warsaw but managed to survive the war). In this movie we follow a live production of the play at the Femina Theater (an actual theater from back then which is now a supermarket in Poland).

The movie takes no breaks, so this 1 hour and 43 minute film shows us the stage and backstage events in complete real time. The drama comes from the complicated nature of the actors and the obvious, constant peril they are all in (and we know now how poorly things will go). The actors all use their own names as the same as the characters in the play, a blending of reality in a way, but the play is also referencing their own lives.

Our main point of view character is Stefcia (Clara Rugaard), who is dating fellow actor Edmund (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and helping raise his young sister Sarah (Dalit Streett Tejeda), a child living in the middle of terror. Things get shaken up when Stef’s ex-boyfriend Patryk (Mark Ryder) shows up with a potential way to flee the ghetto -- but he has only two passes. So Stefcia is torn between the two loves, and her innate desire to continue to entertain -- the only thing she feels she can do to raise people’s spirits.

In the theater, people are forbidden to clap so they instead stomp the floor together, leading to frequent times when the sound of togetherness in fear echo through the theater. In the play itself, there are couples too, and they joke and sing about life in the ghetto -- sometimes slyly hinting at problems with the Jewish police (the collaborators) although they know they can’t be too overt about it.

Thus the drama cuts back and forth between the stage and backstage, especially as the characters sometimes improv new lines or can’t hold back emotional reactions related to their real world problems. The fact that they all use their own names as character names heightens this feeling of unreality, and by the time we get to the coda, the tension and light in the darkness is pushed to its limit -- and becomes a legitimately emotionally affecting scene.

© Nostromo Pictures

The ending feels right, and hits the right notes of bittersweetness, because this is a movie where we know most people aren’t surviving long after the credits roll. The actors all do excellent work here, especially Clara Rugaard as the main actress, having to balance acting-within-acting-within-acting in complex variations.

It’s a rapid pace movie, building up tension until the final moments, but has rarely a false note -- perhaps it’s a little slow to introduce our characters and thus a little confusing at first, and perhaps one of the later “big speeches” is a little too over-written for the character giving it, but it’s a quietly meaningful tale that hints at big ideas below the surface. It’s always looking for life even in when it seems hopeless, and laughing even when a gun is pointed to your head -- not an easy lesson to absorb, but important all the same.

Love Gets a Room has a run time of 1 hour 43 minutes and is not rated. The film is now available on iTunes, get the DVD at Deep Discount, and the soundtrack is on Amazon. Click the icons below for more information.