Martha Coolidge returns to the director’s chair after helming the 2006 chic-flick Material Girls, with a generic WWII romance that, at this point in time, feels dated, done to death, and clearly non-instrumental. This isn’t to say that directors from around the world haven’t been reinventing the genre every now and then, but “I’ll Find You” isn’t particularly interested in doing that. In fact, it gauges its 1930 German invasion of Poland as a mere narrative device, leaving no kind of room for any kind of political context, or emotional resonance to the romance at its center.
To bring you into perspective, “I’ll Find You” drops you right into the middle of Robert (Leo Suter) & Rachel (Adelaide) meeting each other after a brief period of time. The movie establishes that there is history between them, but the script does very little to clearly put its opening as some kind of breakthrough into these lives. We then shift to younger versions of the two; a Young Robert (Sebastian Croft) and a Young Rachel (Ursula Parker), both young music prodigies in Poland who want to learn the Violin.
Initial competitiveness and reluctance aside, sparks fly between them when they let their guards down. Robert, who wasn’t particularly fond of the Violen discovers that his true passion actually lies in being an Opera singer. He understands this when prompted to sing and then readily acknowledged by Opera star Benno Moser (Stellan Skarsgård). We then jump back to the opening and see how Robert and Rachel came to be and their romance rekindles again with little to no hesitation from any end.
The jump, which is set somewhere in 1939, with German troops constantly approaching Poland also clues us for the first time to the fact that Robert is Catholic & Rachel is a Jew. The engagement that she had with a fellow wealthy, young man is casually handed off and she is back with Robert before the invasion happens. Rachel, along with her parent hide in a safe spot before getting captured, and Robert first joins The Resistance and then on a whim decides to go looking for Rachel in the concentration camps because his last words to her were (no points for guessing this) “I’ll Find You.”
However, that is the least of the movie’s problems. The movie then drags into a sense of absolute melancholy with little to no kind of emotional relevance. Robert takes detours after detours and the narrative plods along with a positively reluctant sense of movement. The movie, not for once, tries to actually delve into the War and the repercussions it has on people. For a romance that is set in this backdrop, the set design, and costume oscillate from being great to downright laughable. If you happen to watch the movie there are dialogues here that are so cringe-worthy that you will never hear anyone utter them, even when you assume that is how people talked in the 30s.
The only high point of the film is the times when the characters are playing music. These are moments where the film tries to soar a little higher than its limits, but then it thuds and falls on the ground again, and again. As far as the actors are concerned, they are stuck between bad accents and worse character moments. Only a couple of sequences stand out, making the romance, and the trauma-inducing backdrop feels like a futile exercise in nothingness.
