Love & Funghi (aka Now, Forager)

I wanted to like this film, I felt attracted to the premise, setting and genre. A love story set among the beautiful, wild forests one must visit if one is in the mushroom-picking business. Unfortunately, neither Jason Cortlund (who co-directed) as Lucien Echevarria or Tiffany Esteb as Regina Echevarria managed to move me into caring much about their plights with their work, or indeed their relationship. So concerned with projecting a sombre tone, the performances come across as simply morose, without interest or a foundation of reasoning behind their glum faces. The film needed a little infusion of subordinate characters, simply as a mechanism to ground our protagonist's lives in a reality we could understand or care about: we spend the entirety of the film mushroom-picking, cooking, or solemnly grieving an inexplicably broken marriage. The mushrooms look tasty and beautiful, and the photography, though markedly digital, at times suffering from artefacts, is excellent. Otherwise, there isn't much here to recommend.