From Omeleto.
A man and woman meet again.
IT WAS ENGLISH is used with permission from Brian Petchers. Learn more at https://brianpetchers.com.
Mal is a poet and writer who runs into Ian one morning on the train. It’s a teasing, unexpectedly weighty encounter, both pausing and regarding one another in a sense of suspension.
In a flash, their story unfurls, just as unspoken emotions and unacknowledged feelings rise between them — taking them and the audience to an unexpected place.
Directed and written by Brian Petchers, this unabashedly gorgeous short romance film captures the feeling of love and loss in an achingly lyrical style. With its stream-of-consciousness narrative and a richly melancholy atmosphere that suffuses the film with a sustained feeling of nostalgia, it evokes both the fullness of two people making a life together and the almost heart-wrenching fragility of human connection.
The film is shot in a poetic, almost rhapsodic style, where a stream of beautifully shot romantic images pour onto the screen to the strains of a rich, poignant musical score. Taken as a whole, these visuals evoke the richness and possibility of human love as it evolves, with moments that are by turns sensual, vulnerable, hopeful, humorous and tender. As Mal and Ian’s relationship grows, their life together changes and expands as they marry and raise a family, but the core of their passion and affection remains throughout.
As Mal and Ian, actors Charlotte Hope (THE SPANISH PRINCESS, GAME OF THRONES) and Ian Nelson (TEEN WOLF) are both beautifully matched, evoking the naturalness of two people immediately at ease and enraptured with one another. Both offer performances that are precise and subtle — and beautifully convey what is lost when we don’t seize the moment in front of us as it unfolds.
In many ways, IT WAS ENGLISH evokes the later films of Terrence Malick, with its poetic evocation of everyday life, relationships, and the beauty of the ordinary and human. And like Malick, this film has an almost cosmic dimension, capturing the feeling of an unlived life that branched off from an unexpectedly fateful incident, tucked away somewhere in another pocket of the time-space continuum. It has the effect of nostalgia, but one that has never been experienced directly, only imagined or sensed. Instead of memory, it leaves a ghostly ache in the heart — one we feel when we sense the horizons of a missed opportunity as it recedes away into the flow of time.
