TV-MA | 1h 33m | Drama | 2024
Netflix bills Cypriot Stelana Kliris’s film, which she wrote and directed, as a romance-comedy. It’s neither. It’s a gentle contemplation on commitment to life, love, and family.
After a career dip, middle-aged songwriter-singer John Allman (Harry Connick Jr.) shuts himself off from fame in America and buys a cliffside house in Cyprus. His porch overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, so he’ll get nothing but peace and quiet, right? Wrong. The cliff turns out to be a suicide spot.
Unable to save the first suicidal person he encounters, John resolves to save anyone else who tries suicide. He cordons off the cliffside with a makeshift fence. If they slip past, he’ll talk them out of it.
In town, John meets old flame Sia (Agni Scott), her club-singer daughter Melina (Ali Fumiko Whitney), Sia’s widowed sister Koula, and widowed mother Marikou. Back home, John is saving other lives; he’s also learning how to live his own, starting by forgiving Sia, now a doctor. She’d loved him as his celebrity rose but walked out at the height of it and hid the fact that they’d had a daughter; she feared that stardom meant he’d be fickle and unprepared for fatherhood or faithfulness. Furious at Sia, Melina’s willing to have John as the father she never had. Will Sia have him as the husband she never had?
Real-life singer-songwriter Connick wrote and performed the melodic title track, “Find Me Falling,” and the mediocre “Girl on the Beach.” The Greek ballad he sings for Sia happens to be the one that Scott’s real-life husband, an ex-pop star, sang at her wedding. Whitney sings on seven tracks.
Kliris’s title is a play on “falling in love,” as if involuntarily, instead of jumping voluntarily into a loving relationship. She’s riffing off cliffside suicide here, which involves jumping, not falling voluntarily, thus ending all relationships.
During John’s first encounter with suicide, the man poised at the cliff’s edge dismisses him with, “Go away.” Unaware of the cliff’s grim legacy, John retorts, it’s his property, “No, you go away.” As if obeying, the man jumps. That’s Kliris, critiquing suicide as a selfish going away by pushing away.
Real-Life Savior
Kliris was inspired by real-life savior, Don Ritchie, who lived at a suicide hotspot in Australia, and whose kindness stopped over 160 people from committing suicide. In interviews, she said she wanted to show “the importance of human connection. … This is how John is able to find his humanity again.”In one scene, John and Sia revive their connection with a symbol of distancing between them: the fence. They recall choices they made, and ones they could have, but with closeness, not distance, in mind. Later, John confronts someone else, too, with a choice: Anna, a pregnant young woman, contemplates suicide; she must choose whether fears of ostracism matter more than the love she can give and receive from her baby.
Here, suicide is merely a more sensational version of day-to-day distancing that some people use to cope with fear, hurt, and anger. Sure, even the most intimate love requires healthy distancing occasionally to be sustainable. John’s escape to Cyprus is distancing. But he’s looking for space to find himself. The suicidal person is looking for space to lose himself.
To Kliris, distancing shouldn’t be an end but a means to closeness, to warmth, laughter, and giving. If distancing becomes a habit—mentally, physically, emotionally—it soon becomes a state. Then, it’s only a matter of time before it turns in on itself.
In another scene, Kliris critiques selfish alienation that hides behind masks of independence and self-reliance. Wise old Marikou and her self-righteous daughter Sia share coffee. Sia’s smug in her resilience; she’s had it tough, working and raising Melina on her own. Marikou, who’d been through two wars and a fruitful marriage, corrects her. No, Sia had it easy; she chose to be single: “You never gave your heart to someone. … Never risked the pain of togetherness. … Being on your own is easy. … Being with someone is hard … as are all good things in life.”
Justifiably, critics complain that Kliris’s execution is flawed: no passion, no chemistry, no fun, no pacing, and too few surprises. Still, her film is important for what it says; never mind how it does.
