Affection is pretty confusing. The particular person, habits or orientation we fall in love with, is based on chemical reactions inside our body. Do those reactions segregate on the basis of men or women or someone much more different? Feelings are feelings, and very complicated. Once it takes over your body, there is hardly any way back to normal. The confusion hits us, once we attain puberty and it’s a complex journey from thereon. One such journey is depicted in Dating Amber, a coming of age story about a boy and a girl, Eddie and Amber. But don’t confuse, they aren’t in love with each other, they just pretend to be, for their classmates.
Written and Directed by David Freyne, it narrates the story of two confused teenagers, whose natural attraction doesn’t lie in the opposite sex but in a similar one. Being born in an orthodox Irish Community in the year 1995 when Homosexuality was still considered vile, these two teenagers coin a fake relationship to trick their parents, classmates and all other beings that they are pretty normal, they are normal in actual, just the society isn’t ready to accept it. It is their story against the world.
Dating Amber embeds two prominent characters 17-year-old Eddie (O’Shea) and his classmate Amber (Petticrew). Though the title suggests that it could be the story of Amber, Eddie plays an equally important part. Following the family legacy, Eddie’s dad, Ian (Barry Ward) wants him to join the Irish Army, but a look at Eddie would give you enough reasons on why he shouldn’t consider the profession. Everyone agrees to it, except Eddie’s dad which leads to a subplot of toxic masculinity in Eddie’s life inflicted by his father.
Eddie is not only struggling in the training to join the army school but also suffers from an alienated environment in the school, where everyone is hooking up with each other or is dating someone, except Eddie and Amber.
Amber is another outcast in the college with a dead dad and a widowed mother. Amber rents her Living Fan to needy and horny students of her class. Amber wants to save enough money to run away from a pathetic town to London where she can open her bookshop with franchise potential.
While both Eddie and Amber are completely different with different sets of goals, their homosexuality is the common tangent. Amber is quite clear about it, but Eddie is confused. Constant bullying, curses and ignorance at school, leads to Eddie and Amber association to fake a relationship in front of family and friends until they leave this orthodox backward town.
This leads to a fun ride in which both these individuals start a “Pretend Relationship” and become the talk of the school until Amber finally decides to be open about her sexuality while Eddie is still in denial. What Eddie chooses to be, and how Amber is going to help him, is what the plot explores further.
Dating Amber is a sweet small-town story, about a primitive world, still imposing their opinions and hating the unusual. They don’t mind calling homosexuals, faggots and they are loud and irritating. Eddie and Amber, suffering from an identity crisis of their own, are pushed more by regressive minds, that leads them to find peace in lie and deceit. Amber justifies it saying, “we will pretend to go out just to get everyone to leave us alone.” Though when Amber is fed up of pretending, as most of us get, she reveals to the world her true identity, that leaves Eddie at crossroads to make a choice, be open about being gay or being in denial forever.
We only lie because we haven’t been given enough space to speak the truth, is what exactly happens with Amber and Eddie. Still, how they deal with the world, for whom anything unusual seems dangerous, is what decides their journey and gives strength to their character.
Dating Amber, a teenage love story doesn’t work intensively on the conflicts it promises, like Eddie’s dad and his toxic masculinity, Amber’s mother and her trauma, and Eddie’s parents drifting apart. Much of these subplots are left halfway through that is one of the flaws of the script. It does justice to Amber and Eddie’s character like any other coming of age story, that is outward without much depth. Yet, it is an easy watch movie with a couple of sweet moments and occasional chucks, originating from Amber’s witty character. She is fun to watch throughout. Anyone looking for light teenage drama should check this out, it won’t disappoint you much.
I am an Onstage Dramatist and a Screenwriter. I have been working in the Indian Film Industry for the past 8 years, majorly writing dialogues for various films and television shows., writer-director David Freyne’s dramedy about two queer teens, Eddie (Fionn O’Shea) and Amber (Lola Petticrew), who pretend to be a couple so that they can make it through high school a little less scathed. It’s one of those lines that sometimes captures a character’s plight with such biting precision, and simplicity, that the viewer is caught off guard and the film is left feeling haunted. The place that “will kill you, ” as Amber warns Eddie as well as her herself multiple times in one way or another, is rural Ireland in the 1990s, where divorce is still illegal—an idyllic meadowland plagued by backward prudes and homophobic bullies.
The demands of heterosexuality are lethal to both straights and gays in County Kildare. Amber’s father, for one, took his own life, and ever since then she’s been charging her classmates to use her family’s caravan as a place to have sex, so she can save enough money and move to London and work for a punk zine. By contrast, Eddie wallows in sorrow and denial, his gait the grotesque result of him trying to mimic butchness. He plans to do exactly what’s expected of him—that is, to join the army and marry a nice girl who will probably just make him sleep on the living room couch like his mother (Sharon Horgan) does to his father (Barry Ward). Amber knows that living one’s life according to the desires of others will kill you, so her offer to fake-date Eddie so their peers will stop harassing them seems more like an act of solidarity, an attempt to spare Eddie from the violence that she herself can take in stride.
That keeps pricking us little by little until it completely takes over in the film. Our first warning that humor may have been only the sheen of a much more serious cinematic proposition, a cheeky red herring of sorts, comes in a sequence in which Eddie and Amber take the train to Dublin and happen upon a gay bar. Instead of lusting over male bodies or dancing the night away on drugs (that comes later), Eddie is instantly transfixed by a drag queen singing Brenda Lee’s “You Can Depend on Me.” He approaches her on stage as if, at last, untethered from the world. In a kind of communion, Eddie embraces the drag queen like a lost child re-encountering his mother. She keeps on singing, rocking Eddie as if casting a queer spell, or baptizing the “baby gay, ” as she calls him.
Rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship. Freyne manages to indict the societal expectation of heterosexuality as a traumatizing force while also humanizing its straight victims. A brief scene when Eddie’s doleful mother is, for once, alone at home and puts on a vinyl is particularly wonderful. She looks at her husband’s framed photograph and smiles, reminding us that while the fantasy of heterosexual domesticity holds many promises, in practice, it can be an exhausting hell. “Anywhere!” Amber tells Eddie when he asks her where he could escape to. And as their own faux love affair begins to crumble, they can at last embrace the queerness and messy feelings for which there is no required language, no blueprints, and as such the opportunity to actually find a place that won’t kill them.
Cast: Fionn O’Shea, Lola Petticrew, Sharon Horgan, Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Evan O’Connor Director: David Freyne Screenwriter: David Freyne Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: NR Year: 2020 Buy: Video
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like
Dating Amber, a teenage love story doesn’t work intensively on the conflicts it promises, like Eddie’s dad and his toxic masculinity, Amber’s mother and her trauma, and Eddie’s parents drifting apart. Much of these subplots are left halfway through that is one of the flaws of the script. It does justice to Amber and Eddie’s character like any other coming of age story, that is outward without much depth. Yet, it is an easy watch movie with a couple of sweet moments and occasional chucks, originating from Amber’s witty character. She is fun to watch throughout. Anyone looking for light teenage drama should check this out, it won’t disappoint you much.
I am an Onstage Dramatist and a Screenwriter. I have been working in the Indian Film Industry for the past 8 years, majorly writing dialogues for various films and television shows., writer-director David Freyne’s dramedy about two queer teens, Eddie (Fionn O’Shea) and Amber (Lola Petticrew), who pretend to be a couple so that they can make it through high school a little less scathed. It’s one of those lines that sometimes captures a character’s plight with such biting precision, and simplicity, that the viewer is caught off guard and the film is left feeling haunted. The place that “will kill you, ” as Amber warns Eddie as well as her herself multiple times in one way or another, is rural Ireland in the 1990s, where divorce is still illegal—an idyllic meadowland plagued by backward prudes and homophobic bullies.
The demands of heterosexuality are lethal to both straights and gays in County Kildare. Amber’s father, for one, took his own life, and ever since then she’s been charging her classmates to use her family’s caravan as a place to have sex, so she can save enough money and move to London and work for a punk zine. By contrast, Eddie wallows in sorrow and denial, his gait the grotesque result of him trying to mimic butchness. He plans to do exactly what’s expected of him—that is, to join the army and marry a nice girl who will probably just make him sleep on the living room couch like his mother (Sharon Horgan) does to his father (Barry Ward). Amber knows that living one’s life according to the desires of others will kill you, so her offer to fake-date Eddie so their peers will stop harassing them seems more like an act of solidarity, an attempt to spare Eddie from the violence that she herself can take in stride.
That keeps pricking us little by little until it completely takes over in the film. Our first warning that humor may have been only the sheen of a much more serious cinematic proposition, a cheeky red herring of sorts, comes in a sequence in which Eddie and Amber take the train to Dublin and happen upon a gay bar. Instead of lusting over male bodies or dancing the night away on drugs (that comes later), Eddie is instantly transfixed by a drag queen singing Brenda Lee’s “You Can Depend on Me.” He approaches her on stage as if, at last, untethered from the world. In a kind of communion, Eddie embraces the drag queen like a lost child re-encountering his mother. She keeps on singing, rocking Eddie as if casting a queer spell, or baptizing the “baby gay, ” as she calls him.
Rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship. Freyne manages to indict the societal expectation of heterosexuality as a traumatizing force while also humanizing its straight victims. A brief scene when Eddie’s doleful mother is, for once, alone at home and puts on a vinyl is particularly wonderful. She looks at her husband’s framed photograph and smiles, reminding us that while the fantasy of heterosexual domesticity holds many promises, in practice, it can be an exhausting hell. “Anywhere!” Amber tells Eddie when he asks her where he could escape to. And as their own faux love affair begins to crumble, they can at last embrace the queerness and messy feelings for which there is no required language, no blueprints, and as such the opportunity to actually find a place that won’t kill them.
Cast: Fionn O’Shea, Lola Petticrew, Sharon Horgan, Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Evan O’Connor Director: David Freyne Screenwriter: David Freyne Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: NR Year: 2020 Buy: Video
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like
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