Break the circle It was the best seller that put Colleen Hoover, a writer, on the map of women who has dynamited the rankings of the United States in recent years, with 20 million books sold. Hoover reigns supreme on the bestseller lists The New York Times, on supermarket bookshelves and on social media thanks to their melodramas filled with sex, trauma and domestic abuse. Only Break the circle (2016), her most personal novel, inspired by the gender-based violence her mother suffered, sold four million copies and the rights to its adaptation to Hollywood.
The result of that profitable transaction reaches the screens with actress Blake Lively as the protagonist (and producer) of a drama about abuse under the codes of a sentimental and romantic narrative typical of the serial novel. Can fear be painted without giving up the pink palette? Something like this is proposed by this commercial film aimed, from the start, at the millions of readers of Hoover.
The story is about Lily Bloom, a woman marked since childhood by a dysfunctional home due to her father’s violence, who decides to open a flower shop in Boston. There, among bouquets of roses, will cross paths with a Don Juan neurosurgeon played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni, to whom we owe a few teenage romantic dramas (Two meters from you, 2019; Clouds, 2020) which will also be reflected here, when the past of Lily Bloom, his high school sweetheart, becomes present and with it the surgeon’s jealousy.
Yeah Break the circle It is sustained by Blake Lively and the characterisation of her character, which is so exaggerated in its romanticism that it has its own charm, with that impossible flower shop, or with her way of dressing, always loaded with trinkets to underline her dreamy view of life. Entangled in a relationship with a jealous and violent narcissist, the film shows her slow awakening in a way that is consistent with her character and her loving idealism. It is interesting, above all, how the turning point of abuse is portrayed as something confusing in her head, with the subtext of self-deception always present. Everything seems perfect, while the couple toasts in a very cheesy way with a mimosa cocktail, when the first slap arrives in a strange, accelerated and unexpected way.
There is no idealisation of violence (something that critics object to in Hoover’s novels), but there is evidence that the blows (psychological or physical) are too often portrayed as an accident for which no one was to blame. In this sense, the film leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination, it fulfils its didactic and instructive function, things are finally made clear and the famous circle is broken, even if it is surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
Break the circle
Address: Justin Baldoni.
Performers: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar.
Gender: romantic. United States, 2024.
Duration: 130 minutes.
Release: August 9.
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