Nice hat, Keanu.
Like most mid- 90s films metformin side effects weight gain that aired on cable every weekend of my youth, I’ve seen A Walk in the Clouds (1995) dozens of times. And you know what? It never gets old. This isn’t a lame Nicholas Sparks romance where someone is guaranteed to die; it’s a simple story that doesn’t try to be more meaningful than it is. You just follow two beautiful people over the course of a couple days as they fall in love: the perfect remedy for a romantic dry spell.
And really, this film has everything:
- A soldier fresh from the Pacific theater of WWII
- A ditzy war bride
- A woman knocked up by her professor and worried her traditional Mexican family will reject her
- The soldier offering to be her fake husband that leaves her
- A beautiful vineyard
- PTSD
- Freddie Rodriguez in nerd glasses
- Orphans
- Keanu Reeves delivering the line, “She’s like the air to me”
- A grape harvest
- Slow motion kissing
- Family fights
- Fire
- Anthony Quinn as comic relief
What more could you ask for? Some quality sexual tension? This has got that, too.
- A woman whose hair looks like that when woken in the middle of the night? Keeper.
A Walk in the Clouds may be predictable (a man married to an idiot and an unmarried, smart pregnant woman are thrown together for a few days–WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT!?), but they make it work. I mean, it’s pretty hard to ruin how beautiful Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and K. Reeves look together. Just add in some parents with gravitas (Giancarlo Giannini and Angélica Aragón) to fight against and for their love, and you’ve got the perfect situation for a love story.
And of course I need to mention the music. I’m not usually one for grand, romantic stories (except Gone With the Wind, obvs), but the music captures the dreaminess of the vineyard and just how gorgeous everything looks.
If you’ve made it this far, I think I can go ahead and admit this: I kind of love Keanu Reeves as a romantic lead. He’s not smooth enough or good enough with dialogue to seem smarmy or disingenuous. He’s just a guy. Granted, no one actually says “Why can’t you just love her? She’s so easy to love,” but when he says it, I find it endearing because it’s so awful. And it works in this movie.
Anthony Quinn, Keanu Reeves, and mariachi band: the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.
If nothing else, A Walk in the Clouds proves that good casting is as important acting skill. Sometimes an actor’s presence and general state of being just works for a role, and Keanu’s does here. And since everything about this film is so gorgeously shot, lit, and scored, you completely buy him as Sgt. Paul Sutton who wins the love of Victoria Aragon. I mean, I’d turn on my light if he serenaded me in the middle of the night. Wouldn’t you?
Directed by Alfonso Arau. Written by Robert Mark Kamen, Mark Miller, and Harvey Weitzman. Production Design by David Gropman. Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. Original Music by Maurice Jarre. Edited by Don Zimmerman.
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Giancarlo Giannini, Anthony Quinn, Angélica Aragón, Evangelina Elizondo, Freddy Rodriguez, and Debra Messing.
