End with us it was always going to be a difficult story to bring to life on screen. The film, which is based on Colleen Hoover’s popular novel of the same name, is essentially a drama about an abusive relationship. Hoover was candid about her book’s dark themes, revealing that the inspiration for the story was her own mother leaving her abusive father. And in the years since the novel was published in 2016, there has been endless discourse about how it portrays and addresses trauma. All this is to say that End with us It’s not a cheesy romance – it’s a rather dark film about an undeniably dark subject.
That’s why the film’s costumes, a mismatched fever dream of work clothes, glitter, and bohemian fantasy, aren’t just a bad fit for the story — they’re a jarring distraction. In the film, protagonist Lily Bloom (played by Blake Lively), a Boston flower girl, wears clothes that are as unserious as her name – sequin evening dresses topped with oversized Carhartt jackets, low-slung padded patchwork pants that expose the high waist. – checkered boxer shorts with a waist, a combination of vest and shirt and a leather blazer, reminiscent of the restaurant attendant’s uniform, which she wears at her father’s funeral. The intention is apparently to show that Lily is a quirky but relatable bohemian free spirit. But the effect is a character whose clothes, despite Lively’s earnest efforts as an actress, make her feel completely incompatible with the film in which she’s in.
Read more: End with us I can’t turn trauma into drama
When photos first appeared of the production last yearfans took to social media to criticize Lively’s character’s chaotic costume. “What are these clothes omg,” wrote a user named Holden Smith on TikTokusing an in-app sound to show his mockery. Eric Daman, the film’s costume designer, took the naysayers in stride.
“It’s exciting that there’s so much buzz around the looks themselves, whether it’s positive, and the haters will hate,” Daman said in an interview with Hollywood Reporterwhere he also shared that he worked closely with Lively to develop the looks, calling her “an incredible creative force” with “an incredible eye and incredible taste.” (Lively, for her part, has shared that she used items from her own wardrobe, as well as those of her husband Ryan Reynolds and supermodel friend Gigi Hadid, for the film visual.)
It’s important to note that Daman, Emmy-winning costume designer for Sex and the city, was also Lively’s collaborator on gossip Girlwhere their fantastical styles were more than suited to the drama and debauchery of spoiled Upper East Side teenagers. They may not have been entirely believable, but the characters’ youth and money made it easier to suspend disbelief and accept the excesses. But this same whim largely misses the mark. End with us.
Read more: Breaking all End with us Drama
You don’t need to be a movie buff to know how crucial clothes, and especially costumes, are to telling stories. It can help build a world or break the fourth wall. It can draw the audience into a fantasy or fix them in a time period, provide needed context, or imbue a scene with levity or seriousness. And it can make a character feel intimately relatable, glamorously aspirational, or ridiculously out of reach. As TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek aptly noted during this year’s awards season, “costumes, show-stoppers or not, are essential to the movies’ power,” arguing that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dark-suited look in the film Christopher Nolan’s namesake, starring Cillian Murphy, made the character “a man of his time, but also perpetually out of it”, and who Poor things’ Bella Baxter’s “strange, poetically familiar clothes could have emerged from the fish-eye corners of our wildest dreams.”
Lily is a character whose experience of domestic violence reflects a dark reality that many women can relate to. What a woman wears, of course, has no bearing on whether she is, was or could be a victim of such violence. But here, Lily’s storyline is in constant competition with her clothes. There’s a time and a place for reality-defying clothes, and maybe even a world in which a case can be made for the eclectic dress and Carhartt slip that Lively sports in a pivotal scene in the film. But in End with usit just seems like an excuse to play dress-up, at the character’s expense.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
