“All of You” is set in a slightly futuristic society whose technological and society-altering centerpiece seems to be a test that can positively identify each person’s true soulmate. A pair of longtime platonic friends played by Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots have differing opinions about the test – she wants to take it, he thinks it’s ridiculous – but in the opening scene, he gives her the money to do it, and by doing so sets the story in motion.
And from that moment on, the soulmate test is pretty much irrelevant to “All of You,” which premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a classic cinematic MacGuffin, important to get things going and insignificant to what happens from that point on, which turns out to be a decades-spanning, vaguely “When Harry Met Sally”-style story of a friendship that could be something more if the people involved would only wake up and acknowledge the attraction that we all know they feel.
It starts out as a comedy and eventually morphs into a bittersweet romance, suffused with longing and driven along by the fact that Goldstein and Poots make for an unconventional couple who are fun to watch and capable of touching our hearts, as he showed occasionally on “Ted Lasso” and she in “The Father.”
Director William Bridges, making his feature debut after co-writing the film with Goldstein and basing it on a short the two of them made 15 years ago, is pretty sure-handed with the comic elements that win us over before he fully commits to weepy moments and swelling strings. It makes the film another crowd-pleaser at a festival that has been long not on prestige awards-bait movies, but on interesting and satisfying audience films.
Poots is Laura and Goldstein is Simon, BFFs who have been close for years when we meet them on their way to the clinic where she will have the test. Even then, we know they were meant to be together — and we suspect that they know it, too, but the conversation stays light and easygoing, if full of playful arguments. He mocks her for wanting to take the test, which he says has resulted in lots of friends focusing solely on their newly-identified soul mates at the expense of all their previous mates.
“We’ve lost too many people to those bloody tests,” he says with a scowl that’ll be familiar to anyone who watched “Ted Lasso.”
“They’re not going to war, Simon,” Laura says.
“No, they’re in love,” he says.“That’s worse.”
When Laura goes in to take the test, Simon suggests that it’ll be the last time they ever see each other – but it’s not, because the first of many jump cuts finds them meeting on the street in an unspecified future time. She gushes about her soul mate Luke, he flirts with a friend of hers at a loud nightclub, and then the films skips through time to another meeting.
Their lives flit by, with Laura having a baby and Simon’s relationship breaking up. But the movie can’t just settle into the tale of two decent people who can’t acknowledge their bond, so a subsequent jump finds them at her father’s memorial service, where the conversation goes a little deeper. “The day I took the test, did you give me the money because you thought it might be you?” Laura asks.
“Naaaah,” says Simon, after pausing for entirely too long before answering.
The next thing you know, she’s knocking on his door in the middle of the night for some torrid sex, followed by her ghosting him and then accusing him of taking advantage of her in a weak moment. “It didn’t mean anything!” she insists with a fury that doesn’t fool anybody for a second.
Of course it gets complicated from there — and the more complicated and passionate it gets, the less funny it gets. Still, Goldstein and Poots are a quirky couple, not at all the standard-issue romantic leads, and they’re quite adept at being the kind of people who amuse us but also deserve to be taken seriously, taking this twisted rom-com down darker paths.
“Can we ignore our obvious attraction forever?” can be a question to explore with humor; “where do we go from here?” is less of one, particularly since Goldstein and Bridges aren’t interested in turning Laura’s husband into a bad guy or using their daughter as a pawn.
So the rom-com becomes a love story about impossible love, which means it does a certain amount of basking in misery. “All of You” is not a tearjerker because the guy who gave us Roy Kent doesn’t do tearjerkers — but it’s unexpectedly touching and even lovely, a grandly sad benediction to people who don’t need no stinkin’ test to tell them who their soulmate is.
