Getting to Know You (2020)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) There is filmmaking life in Ontario outside Toronto, and after seeing Sudbury become a minor film shooting metropolis in the field of Canadian Science Fiction, here we have Sault Ste. Marie acting as backdrop to intimate romantic comedy Getting to Know You. It starts in a quasi-theatrical fashion, as two travellers meet in an almost-empty hotel. He’s a prodigal son coming back to town for a high-school reunion, hoping to declare his long-lasting love for his hometown sweetheart; she’s a London-based photographer coming back to clean up her estranged dead brother’s house. After a first act almost entirely set in a hotel, the film opens up, and so do the characters: his plans to romance his sweetheart hilariously derail, she’s asked to play his wife and complications simply pile up the longer the two protagonists stay in a small town where everybody knows each other. It’s not headed toward an easy ending: Getting to Know You plays things on a low, almost melancholic key. There are quite a few moments of genuine comedy along the way, but the end of the film is more contemplative than triumphant, which is disappointing but not inappropriate. Natasha Little and Rupert Penry-Jones headline the film, which means that they are on-screen for nearly all of it. Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin doesn’t too badly—although the impression left by the first act of the film is a bit misleading and disjoints the film’s spatial unity (at least the story ends when they leave town). Still, it’s an amiable-enough film, significantly more interesting than the Hallmark romantic movies often shot elsewhere in non-Toronto Ontario.