Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks.
That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.
Indeed, what’s most interesting about German-born filmmaker Atef’s return to her home turf — after a directing stint on TV’s “Killing Eve” and last year’s predominantly French romance “More Than Ever,” with Vicky Krieps and the late Gaspard Ulliel — is its frank, sometimes unapologetically ugly carnality.
In depicting a relationship that begins as a kind of instinctive animal attraction before deepening into something more soulful, this adaptation of Daniela Krien’s 2011 novel understands the compelling (and, yes, sometimes story-propelling) power of raw physical touch, and the ways in which people can meaningfully know each other through skin and sweat before all else.
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