And While We Were Here


The film And While We Were Here was released at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival in black and white, but was shot in color, and ultimately will be released in color. The director, Kat Coiro, details her decision to release it in color in this article, and it's a compelling read. The version I saw of it was in color, and I loved the lush colors of Italy shown throughout; however, I think it would have been interesting to see it in black and white.

Jane (Kate Bosworth) and her husband Leonard (Iddo Goldberg) are in Italy for two weeks for his job - he's a violist in an orchestra that's playing concerts there. Jane has a project she's working on, too: she recorded her grandmother talking about WWII, and is eventually going to use the interviews for a book. She then meets Caleb (Jamie Blackley), however, a 19-year-old carefree boy for whom she ends up falling for; it doesn't help that Leonard keeps a distance from her as well. Soon, however, she must choose between Leonard - a stable man who does love her, though he has weird ways of showing it - and Caleb, who wants her to travel to Tibet with him.


I liked the performances in this film very much, and Italy was almost a character in itself: the scenery was gorgeous. In real life, Bosworth is 30, Goldberg is 38, and Blackley is 22, and I think Bosworth's character age was probably somewhere around 25-27; the movie mentions that she met Leonard when she was 19, and they got married because she got pregnant, but she later lost the baby. To me, it seems that they married for that and not for love, because later on in the movie they don't seem to have much in common.

Yes, see this film. It's already out on video on-demand (VOD), so you can find it that way, and it's opening in theaters on September 13th. It's not a movie that's going to win any awards, but I found the relationships in the film to be interesting, and the ending is especially unusual for a "love triangle" movie. I haven't seen Bosworth on the big screen in a while, too - she used to do "chick flicks" like Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and Blue Crush, back in the early 2000s - and she proves here that she's still got what it takes to be a leading actress. I also found it interesting that near the beginning of the movie, she kept her hair back in a ponytail and wore "grown-up clothes" - loose-fitting khakis and billowy shirts - and once she met Caleb, she started wearing her hair down more and wearing shirts and t-shirts, like she was more carefree. I'd recommend And While We Were Here to anyone that likes a good story, and the cinematography is, of course, a nice bonus as well.

And While We Were Here is rated R with a runtime of 83 minutes. 3.5 stars out of 5.

*Disclosure: I received free screening tickets to see this movie from the Gathr Film Series, in exchange for promoting the film. The opinions expressed here, however, are my own.

 Click here to read my interview with the director of And While We Were Here, Kat Coiro!

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