It’s getting harder and harder to find truly enjoyable bad movies. Cinemas are now almost exclusively full of franchise instalments too expensive to invite any sort of risk. The low-budget stuff has discovered how to paper over flaws with a veneer of cheap self-awareness. Sometimes, most disappointingly of all, when a film has badness baked into its very DNA – like this year’s genuinely ludicrous McConaughey/Hathaway noir Serenity – the result is just unacceptably boring when it should have been spectacularly silly.
A great bad film – a film where nothing is left on the table, where the script is weird and the budget is squandered and the sex scenes are startlingly graphic and there’s at least one screen legend who looks constantly terrified – just doesn’t come along very often. So when it does, it should be celebrated. Reader, allow me to celebrate See You Soon.
See You Soon is a romance about a world famous football player (who is world famous despite playing in America) who crashes his car after getting drunk and becoming distracted by Instagram. Injured, he boards what is either a cruise ship or a moderately sized yacht depending on the shot, and meets a single mother from St Petersburg who has taken a job onboard after escaping her violent husband. They fall in love, but for some reason choose not to exchange any sort of contact details, instead preferring to meet at a set location at a set time at some point in the future. Five minutes before that time comes, the woman’s son falls into a coma after getting pushed to the ground by a bully, and they fail to meet. But then they meet anyway, after the footballer bails on a visit with a Make A Wish kid, and the credits are soundtracked to You’re The Inspiration by Chicago. And Harvey Keitel is in it. Honestly, I don’t understand why you aren’t already watching it.
It is such a glorious mess. The footballer, played by Liam McIntyre from Spartacus: Blood and Sand, is the sort of doofus that says his own name out loud whenever he signs an autograph. Jenia Tanaeva, who plays the female lead, has one of those faces where you can’t quite tell if she’s 20 or 60. There are cameos from sporting stars, who all deliver their lines like they’re translating them to English from Esperanto on the fly. The title is terrible. It’s a safe, toothless daytime TV romance, apart from one scene which contains some off-puttingly gratuitous nudity. And then there’s Harvey Keitel, whose performance as a possibly concussed sporting agent makes his Direct Line insurance ads in the UK look like a highlight reel from a Bergman film.
Individually these are all ingredients of a bad film. But there’s an undercurrent that elevates See You Soon, a low-key Wiseau-esque mycelium of How On Earth Did This Get Made? And that’s provided by Jenia Tanaeva, who wrote the script and played the lead despite having no previous acting or writing credits. The woman has almost literally appeared out of nowhere. Her Instagram account seems to have recently been deleted. She has only given a few interviews; one to something called Naluda Magazine and another to made-to-measure suits. She is a true enigma.
You can pull a rudimentary bio from scraps of information online. Apparently Tanaeva was born in St Petersburg, living in a tiny apartment with her parents, grandparents and sister. She unhappily married a heavyweight wrestling champion, had two children and found work as the assistant to a Russian billionaire. Seeking a better life, she divorced her husband and moved to Los Angeles with her two young children, three suitcases and no plans. See You Soon came to fruition after chance meetings with a Warner Bros executive, which led to her getting script notes from Michael Eisner. Somehow, and honestly I have no idea how, she single-handedly willed See You Soon into the world. It shouldn’t exist, but it does, and that’s all down to one woman.
See You Soon clearly means everything to Tanaeva. It’s a Cinderella story that she wrote for herself, where she gets to escape her own real-life background. And this is what makes it so special. There isn’t a drop of cynicism to be found anywhere in this film. Even the climactic moment where McIntyre jumps about three inches over a bridge is played for every heart-rending ounce of emotion it can muster. She has poured herself into this project. And, in a way, the fact that it’s not very good just makes it more special.
You won’t see a passion project as passionate as See You Soon all year. Don’t get me wrong; it is a bad film. But it’s also a little bit brilliant.
See You Soon is released in the US on 26 July with a UK date yet to be announced
