Doomed love…but make it funny!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/01/2025 (300 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In this likable but somewhat scattered feature-film debut, Toronto-based filmmaker José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço finds an improbable scripting partner in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, an early influence on the German Romantics.

With The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s 1774 novel of doomed, melancholy love, meeting the fun, funny tropes of a 21st-century rom-com, this is destined to be an oddball pairing.

And while Young Werther possesses some beguiling charms, including nimble work from leads Douglas Booth (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Lourenco struggles to find a workable tone. With a story that simultaneously riffs on and spoofs the swoony passions of the big-R Romantic movement, the film’s zany comic energy eventually fizzles out.

Lourenco starts off with a flash-forward in which the titular young Werther (Booth) lies bleeding, in an attractive sort of way, under a tree.

“I’m probably dying, all because of stupid love,” he declares.

Because this is 2025, he is, of course, speaking into his phone.

We then flash back to figure out how Werther got here — and why this setup is probably not as dramatic as it looks.

Werther is a well-tailored would-be writer from a wealthy Westmount family in Montreal. He’s on a trip to Toronto when he meets Charlotte (Pill), the woman he decides — almost instantaneously — is the love of his life. The two end up dancing the night away at a cool club, only for Werther to discover Charlotte is engaged to a guy named Albert (Patrick J. Adams of Suits).

“You’d like him,” Charlotte suggests. And Werther does like him, Albert being a genuinely good person, as well as “handsome like a ’60s astronaut.”

Thus begins a complicated three-way relationship. Albert’s only fault being that he does too much pro bono legal work and isn’t around much, Werther seizes his advantage and decides to pull Charlotte into an antic, incredibly good-looking montage of spontaneous stuff to do in Toronto.

This is a nice break for Charlotte, who’s spent much of her young life looking after her orphaned siblings and is by necessity so practical she keeps pliers in her purse.

For Goethe’s original audience, all this chaste hanging out would demonstrate, as Werther says, that Charlotte is his “forever love of inimitable pureness.” Contemporary viewers are more likely to suspect he’s stalled out in the friend zone.

Realizing he might be perceived as a feckless fellow unable to follow through on anything, Werther recommits to his writing and takes a job in the law. Mostly he looks swell in a series of terrific prep outfits while reporting on his tortured feelings to his sidekick Paul (Jaouhar Ben Ayed of No Man’s Land, whose part here is underwritten).

One senses the influence of filmmaker Whit Stillman’s examinations of the “urban haute bourgeoisie” in the banter, which is light and quick but not as clever as it could be.

Visually, there are several nods to Wes Anderson, including old-money interiors, a gorgeous aquamarine typewriter and a natty brown corduroy suit.

Lourenço is also sharply self-aware about how his source material might land in 2025. There’s a suggestion that Werther’s grand passion for Charlotte is possibly a tad self-indulgent — maybe a bit more about him than her.

Charlotte’s bestie Melanie (The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Amrit Kaur, also underwritten) even suggests his behaviour could be seen as slightly stalker-ish.

“I’m not a stalker,” Werther insists. “I love her.”

“That’s the No. 1 thing stalkers say,” Melanie points out.

Booth’s performance helps modernize the figure of Werther, making him vain and extravagant and slightly deluded but finishing off with real emotional sweetness and a light comic touch. Likewise Pill, who could have been reduced to a romantic ideal, manages to bring a much-needed crispness to her role.

Lourenço’s scripting also speaks to our time. When Paul asks Werther whether he’s about to die for love, Werther just scoffs: “This isn’t 18th-century Germany.”

The tragic conclusion of Goethe’s unbelievably popular novel was said to have inspired a wave of suicides across Europe, though there’s debate over whether this is actual statistical fact or just an early example of moral panic about the supposedly ruinous effects of pop culture. In that case, German authorities fretted that youngsters were being turned into dissolute sensation seekers by too much novel-reading. (Too much novel-reading! Let’s bring that back!)

The film’s softened ending also raises some interesting questions about how movies dealing with modern love should wrap up. As with almost all rom-coms made since those “Is the Rom-com Dead?” pieces started showing up, Young Werther offers some meta commentary on whether the tropes of the genre can function when, as Melanie says, “anyone can do anything with anybody.”

Awkwardly plotted and paced, the film might not be entirely successful, but it adds some fresh, pertinent points to the ongoing conversation about what the rom-com can be in our complicated era.

arts@freepress.mb.ca