As award season continues its furious pace where each week there looks to be another festival darling with major Oscar prospects, it’s good to remember the smaller more independently fronted films fight hard just to be seen by an audience. One of those worthwhile films, Carlos Marques-Marcet‘s”Anchor and Hope” will be released on November 16th. Marcet’s last film “10.000 Km” was a clever play on romance with a long distance relationship portrayed through the icy detachment of technology. “Anchor and Hope” takes a more traditionalist narrative approach but does so with characters and performances that thoroughly captivate.
There will always be performers who deserve better, but few castings have stung quite as harshly as Oona Chaplin‘s thankless job as Rob Stark’s wife Talisa in “Game of Thrones.” An absolute knockout and subtle scene-stealer in the criminally underrated “The Hour,” Chaplin‘s screen presence crackled and here, she’s finally given another meatier role. She and Natalia Tena (another thankless “Game of Thrones” role veteran) have wonderful chemistry in “Anchor And Hope,” alongside the third in their trio, David Verdaguer.
In our 2018 SXSW Film Festival review, we wrote, “at its base and its best, the ‘Anchor and Hope’ moments where the characters gently live and grow with one another are worth living with.”
In their mid-30s, Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena) have a fun and carefree, simple life in their London canal boat until Eva, inspired by her exceptional mother Germaine (played by her real mother Geraldine Chaplin), presents Kat with an ultimatum: she wants a child. Kat resists, knowing that it will end the bohemian lifestyle that she’s always envisioned with Eva. When Kat’s best friend, Roger (David Verdaguer), drops in from Barcelona, the three of them toy around with the idea of creating a baby together. Kat sees no other way out but to say yes.
As the three begin to look forward as one family, their differing expectations of intimacy and responsibility put a heavy strain on their relationship and threatens to rip the three apart.