An Unforgettable Year: Spring ends the Unforgettable Year series with a whimper amongst the spring flowers. For those new, this is a stand-alone series where each movie (season) tells its own story of teen romance with a new protagonist. Unlike the other entries, Spring does not have a significant setting. It looks like an average, but beautiful, Brazil city. And our protagonist, Jasmine (Livia Silva) is ready to graduate high school, if she can pass math first.
2023
Directed by: Bruno Garotti, Jamile Marinho
Screenplay by: Vince Marcello, Maira Oliveira, and Ana Pacheco
Starring: Livia Silva, Ronald Sotto
Perhaps it’s the lack of relatability to the character, but this protagonist is poorly written. She just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. She’s failing math, and not just failing, but got 0 because she turned her test into an elaborate and detailed art doodle. She would rather be an artist than a mathematician. This is fair but they’re trying to convince us that she aces all of her other subjects. Math is the only subject that she refuses to learn? Chemistry is fine? Physics is fine? I don’t believe you. I also don’t believe that neither her teachers nor her parents recognized that she fails math until the second last test of her senior year of high school. Way too convenient that this was never a problem until now.
Also her parents want her to go to business school instead of a fine arts school. But she’s failing math! Even though her parents know she’s struggling with math, they still think she should run a business. I can understand parents wanting a more stable career than artist, but pick something she can actually do, which if we are to believe the movie, is any other subject in school.
But on we go to the romance plot of the movie. Jasmine’s teacher hires a tutor for her – Davi (Ronald Sotto) a really good-looking teaching assistant who is applying to go the best math and tech university in Latin America. Jasmine falls for him instantly but because he actually does help her and teaches her math. But of course there are a few problems here. One of the first thing he identifies is that she’s always drawing during math class rather than paying attention, so he challenges her to concentrate on math exclusively for the next two days, no drawing. The next scenes are montages of her drawing. Given how the rest of the movie goes, this is not her failing the challenge, this is the movie completely ignoring their own screenplay. The movie would rather be this free-flowing artistic rendering of life, love and beauty, but it’s stuck being a by-the-numbers teen romance where it really struggles with basic logic.
Like the other movies in the series, An Unforgettable Year: Spring is a well produced movie which really highlights the beautiful geography of Brazil and it’s also well cast. The lead actress has a really dynamic screen presence, she comes across as a very bright girl and confident in her own creativity, exactly what Jasmine is supposed to be. But the character is too poorly written to be able to get wrapped up in the comedy and drama of the movie.
