| I really hate it when romantic comedies can’t do any better than a meaningless generic title. Like what significance does This Little Love of Mine have? None. It is as meaningless and generic as you can possibly get, and they didn’t try that much harder for the actual movie itself. It is literally ‘big city lawyer goes back to hometown and falls for childhood friend’. | | 2021
Directed by: Christine Luby
Screenplay by: George Harrison
Starring: Saskia Hampele, Liam McIntyre
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I know everyone says Hallmark does it better; not necessarily true. There is exactly one thing This Little Love of Mine has going for it: it’s shot on location in Australia. While Sapphire Cove where this takes place, isn’t explicitly a real island, it is shot in Palm Cove, which is a real place. Not an island, but Palm Cove is a small city on the northern coast of Australia, where the only industry is tourism, and it’s what we see on the screen. Good luck to our hot shot city lawyer starting her own law firm in… checks notes… a town of 2,000 people with one (really nice) hotel, but I digress.
Laura (Saskia Hampele) is our big city lawyer. She’s up for a promotion to partner but first she has to land a billionaire client who has tasked her with getting his succession contract signed. Some notes, the billionaire client is 85, retiring, and she knows him from her childhood. So, umm, what type of business is a retired, former-business owner going to provide after this contract is signed? Can’t be that lucrative of a client anymore, but since she knew him, maybe she should have tried to get his business decades ago, you know, back when he was a billionaire business owner and would have had a need for lawyers.
Anyway, the contract. Said billionaire is planning on leaving his company to his grandson. A grandson who has never worked in the company and has never wanted to work in the company, and has a charity project that he works on from the beach in Sapphire Cove. Chip (Liam McIntyre) also happens to be Laura’s childhood beau.
Meanwhile, Laura is engaged to a walking, talking cliché named Owen (Craig Horner) – they really nailed the casting of an overly-ambitious lawyer who can’t understand how his girlfriend might have her own thoughts and feelings. Laura also has a boss who says things like “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done!”, so helpful. Laura herself has been programmed to say that she doesn’t like having fun. And that’s the whole plot. Laura tries to get Chip to sign the contract, Chip spends his time showing Laura how to have fun. Laura is a poor character since she’s too stupid to be a lawyer, but Chip is endearing at least.
This Little Love of Mine is slow moving and has a painfully simplistic plot, but my god is it beautiful. You could just watch it for the beaches, the palm trees, the coral reefs, the snorkelling, the hiking, the blueness of the water, and those shots are all real. I hope Tourism Australia was an investor for this film, because they would reap the rewards handsomely.
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