Love Actually

Richard Curtis’s first film as director states its thesis with airport footage at the opening and the close. That footage is not performed. It was shot at Heathrow with hidden cameras, and whenever the crew caught something they liked, a runner went over and asked those people to sign a release. The part that carries the film’s thesis was shot with real passengers rather than actors. Four of the strands Curtis devised were cut, and two of them had already been filmed. One followed a headmistress through the last days of her dying partner, played by Anne Reid and Frances de la Tour, ending with Karen offering condolences before the school concert. The other, shot in Kenya, followed a couple who had survived a famine together. Curtis said he was really sorry to lose them, and the first was the only gay love story in the picture. The structure runs on a calendar, with title cards counting the weeks left until Christmas. Hugh Grant called shooting his dance through Downing Street excruciating and absolute hell, and the interiors that dance runs through were built at Shepperton. A good fit if you want the airport material read as documentary rather than performance. Not for a viewer who reads that dance sitting next to Alan Rickman’s quietly collapsing marriage as incoherence.