I had no idea who Sam Taylor-Wood was when I watched Love You More while programming Cinequest in 2009. I watched it early in the morning, I think about 6am, enjoying my coffee. While watching shorts, I'm often doing two or three other things, typically checking my eMails, or back in those days, doing layout for The Drink Tank. I know a movie is something special if everything else drops and it's the only thing that I can hold on to. Early that morning, before I had discovered the joy of coffee other than at cons.
And I could not take my eyes off the screen.
The film is about Peter, played by Harry Treadaway, and his awakening by the luxuriously post-punk dreamgirl Georgia, who is played with a brilliant sense of sexuality and straight-ahead joy. The two go through their motions, and there's a connection, not only between the two of them, but also between the couple and the music of The Buzzcocks, and of the era in which they are living and the class strata they're representing. It's a layered thick and pointedly executed movie.
Now, if this movie had come to me in 2015, I would have been falling all over myself. I had no idea who Sam Taylor-Wood (now Sam Taylor-Johnson) was, or even who the Young British Artists were. Sure, I knew Damian Hirst, but he may as well have been an island in a sea of unrelated artists.. Taylor-Wood was a big part of that crew of Arts miscreants, and it wasn't until recently (because I listened to an episode of I Don't Hate This) that I learned the truth about the YBA. Also, she directed 50 Shades of Grey, so there's that...
The film is the work of a fully-formed director. She had yet to direct Nowhere Boy, but watching Love You More, you can see where she was headed.