It Had To Be You (Sasha Gordon, 2015): USA

Reviewed by Markus Linecker. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2016.

At the first sight It Has To Be You looks like every other romantic comedy. But after five minutes I felt I was on a very different terrain. The  neurotic Sonia freaks out when her boyfriend tries to propose. Even though she wants big things in life, she is very much afraid of commitment. She slowly scares her boyfriend away and tries to live life to the fullest.

In many other films of this genre, it is primarily the male character who is afraid of the commitment. It is very refreshing to see the opposite. Writer/director Sasha Gordon heads a film that seems very frantic and crazy, but in a good way. Sonia is played by the wonderful Cristin Milioti, who seems like a down-to-earth Zooey Deschanel. She portrays the character’s fear and anxiety in such a organic way that the audience is drawn into her panic and emotions.

Opposite Sonia is Chris, who is played by Dan Soder. I really felt sorry for Chris throughout the film, as he tries too hard to make Sonia happy and she just cannot be happy with him. Again, this is a gender-reversal as the one desperate to maintain connection in this case is the male. She ends up sleeping with her boss, who follows trope in only wanting her for sex. This does not paint her into a corner for some nice man to save her out of, however. Once she gives up on all the self-destruction, she decides to travel to Italy and learns that life is not always how she wants it. Through an old friend who does not end up acting in such a friendly manner, she realizes that her original relationship might be the very thing that she was looking for all along.

One of the highlights of the film is Nora (Halley Feiffer) and Mark (Mark Gessner) who play their best friends. These four have amazing chemistry, and I was waiting for every scene where the four are all included. Once they were together, her friends would always have the answers to Sonia’s issues, but she would never see that they knew what they were talking about. Mark’s foul mouth manages to hit the point in a creative way, which was always humorous.

This film show the change in our society, where women can be the lead character who decides what she wants in life, and be as broken and confused and struggling as they need to be, without question about their validity in the role of protagonist.