Book of Love is the rom-com about writers you didn’t know you needed

An endearing rom-com about opposites attracting, Book of Love linearly and religiously follows a typical three-act structure and hero’s journey. It’s a love story and a love story, but also about stories and who gets to tell them.

You will have to suspend your disbelief to accept that Henry Copper – played by the ever-charming, gods-sculpted Sam Claflin – is a failed English author who has no idea how to talk to girls because boarding school denied him the chance to learn how more than a decade into his past. Not much is shown about his life in London because the narrative suggests there is nothing to show, except that his bland, insipid book only sold a handful of copies and he will soon struggle to pay rent.

Henry is a bit of a one-dimensional nobody, with no family nor friends; he has never even been in love or a relationship, so much so that even in his romance book he refutes the idea of sex altogether, praising instead an idealized purity of love, chastity that, like his prose, belongs to a different era. Reluctant to give up his sparkless routine, he is forced by his publisher on a journey to Mexico, where his book is – inexplicably – an unlikely best-seller.

Enter Maria Fernanda Rodriguez, a lively but disillusioned powerhouse who spends her life cleaning after men because she has no other option. She works two jobs to support her family, while she single-handedly raises her son and takes care of her elderly grandfather even though the boy’s father is in the picture but constantly disappointing her. Maria has dreams she knows cannot be ambitions, and she spends her practically inexistent free time taking notes for a novel she knows she will never get to write.

The closest she ever got to her dream was translating Henry’s book, The Sensible Heart. Only… there’s a reason why El Corazon Sensible did so spectacularly in Mexico. Maria broke every translator’s rule and rewrote the entire book as a spicy, lustful sex novel, which is all evident from the cover and the way an army of crazed fans greet Henry once he lands in the country.

The two writers find themselves in enclosed spaces a lot on their book tour. Needless to say, the truth comes out, chaos ensues, and eventually, so does romance. When Henry’s publisher makes him write a sequel with Maria and the two are forced to cooperate, sparks do fly.

Obstacles come up and the spell is broken. When it’s all said and done, it’s lovely to see Henry be willing to bridge the gap between them, how he tries to learn more than broken Spanish, and how he must have fought to have Maria’s name on the cover of the book. That he is not shy to go on stage and confess everything shows that knowing Maria made him the best version of himself. He’s not transformed, just paraphrased? His public “You re-wrote me,” is possibly the single most romantic love declaration a writer could speak to another writer.

Everyone will agree that this should have been Maria’s story – and that is exactly the point the narrative is trying to make. Her life and what she has to say are much more interesting than Henry’s, but she didn’t get the same opportunities he did. I appreciated the choice to only lightly touch upon this, for the comedy could have hardly carried through with a more predominant plot about inequality. The film shows rather than tells but gets the message across nonetheless, perhaps in an even more powerful way than it would have if it leaned into potentially pitiful and on-the-nose comments about injustice.

The premise certainly could have lent itself to even more funny exchanges: given the nature of the plot, there was a lot more room for misunderstandings, terrible errors, innuendoes, jokes getting lost in translation. That is not to say that the film’s humor fell flat, hardly so; just that it could have borrowed a thing or two from the telenovelas it dances dangerously close to, to provide more exaggerated, quasi-campy sequences, as the peaks of comedy are indeed reached when the film goes full-on typical romance novel.

Veronica Echegui carries this film. Claflin, to stay in character, succeeds in not stealing the spotlight. The supporting cast of exaggerated characters was a welcome addition, even if not well-developed: the crazily optimistic sidekicks Henry finds in his agents Jen and Pedro, the ever-patient wise old man Max, the asshole ex-boyfriend Antonio who succumbs to jealousy and revenge, the sweet boy Diego, and the Maenad-like fans.

Book of Love doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it try to take itself too seriously. It’s a one-of-a-kind romance about two worlds colliding and meeting halfway.

Directed by Analeine Cal y Mayor and co-written with David Quantick, produced by Buzzfeed Studios, Book of Love premieres on Amazon Prime Video on February 22 in the US and on Sky on February 12 in the UK.