An affecting and delicate teen romance, Gus Van Sant's Restless charts the first love between students Enoch and Annabelle, a couple of like-minded outsiders who first encounter one another at a funeral in their native Portland. The location of that initial 'meet-cute' points to the tragedy-tinged melancholy that underpins the film's sense of airy charm. Orphaned by a terrible car crash, Enoch (appealingly played by Henry Hopper, son of Dennis) is a withdrawn, sensitive kid whose spare time is spent gatecrashing funerals and conversing with the ghost of a kamikaze pilot; Annabelle (Mia Wasikowska) meanwhile is having to confront mortality in a much starker way, having been diagnosed with life-threatening cancer some time before dating Enoch. Owing something to the gothic whimsy of Hal Ashby's 1971 Harold and Maude, the film combines droll restraint with swoony intensity, and confirms Van Sant as one of Hollywood's most astute and sensitive chroniclers of American youth.

Edward Lawrenson