gridoon2024 Review of Lovesick

Lovesick (1983)

Starts out as "Woody Allen Lite", gets progressively worse

[4/10 · 21 March 2023]

"Lovesick" (1983) was written and directed by Marshall Brickman, whose main claim to fame are his collaborations with Woody Allen on some of the latter's most widely acclaimed films. And indeed this one plays like a Woody Allen film for a while, set in New York's artistic / psychoanalytic milieu, and even featuring some of the familiar Allen speech patterns and rhythms. But it gets worse. Basically it becomes a creepy male fantasy (short middle-aged man steals the keys to the apartment of beautiful, intelligent young woman almost half his age whom he is supposed to be treating in a professional capacity, reads her diary, hides in her bathtub, she finds him there, he confesses, so of course she falls head over heels for him, that sort of thing) under the guise of a drably shot, meandering "romantic" comedy. An appealing Elizabeth McGovern and an amusing Alec Guinness as Freud are among the film's few bright spots. *1/2 out of 4.