Cast: Rena Owen, Dean O'Gorman, Simon Prast, Nancy Brunning, Sophia Hawthorne, Simon Westaway
Director: Garth Maxwell
Producers: Michele Fantl, Jonathan Dowling
Screenplay: Garth Maxwell, Rex Pilgrim, Peter Wells
Cinematography: Darryl Ward
Music: Angus McNaughton
A dull, uninspired import from New Zealand, director Garth Maxwell's trilogy of love stories (one gay, one lesbian, one heterosexual) gets bogged down in an inert plot. The film goes absolutely nowhere, and doesn't even give us characters worth caring about - four of the six principals are uninteresting, and the two who capture our attention are given little more than token screen time. They are Sally (Sophia Hawthorne) and Fig (Nancy Brunning), a pair of young female musicians who function both as the narrators of When Love Comes and two of the main characters. Their exuberance is a welcome contrast to the lifelessness of everyone else, but they're not around long enough to effectively counterbalance the overwhelming sense of lethargy that grips Maxwell's film.
Rena Owen, who was brilliant in Once Were Warriors, gives a solid performance as Katie Keen, a singer whose best years are long past. She longs to be in the spotlight again, but her career is dead. She moves in with an old pal, Stephen (Simon Prast), who's living with a drugged-out lyricist named Mark (Dean O'Gorman, doing a bad imitation of James Dean). Meanwhile, Katie is being pursued by her boyfriend, Eddie (Simon Westaway), who won't let her go without a fight. The characters, like the plot, are recycled. The only thing that's remotely unusual is the setting of Auckland. Owen's performance, one of the few good things about the film, is a wasted effort. In the end, we don't really care whether the couples stay together or blow apart, and their interaction, like the script, lacks energy. Despite only being one and one-half hours long, When Love Comes threatened to put me to sleep in the middle of the day.
© 1999 James Berardinelli