Love Me Tender

Love Me Tender follows three young guys who all for some reason or another find themselves in challenging situations. We meet Aidan who after being de-housed in London, caught a train to Hastings and took up refuge in a small woodland area within a caravan park. Then there's Gareth who, fresh out of jail, is adapting to life in his own flat. And finally, there's Gaz who is trying to stay in touch with his daughter after splitting from her mother.

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The problem I had with the film, is that you don't really have a chance to want to take the title into consideration. Gaz is too busy partying and telling us that he couldn't deal with the hormonal post-pregnant mother of his child for us to actually care about him. It gets slightly better with Gareth, although I would have liked time to explore his backstory further. He looked as though he was fighting a constant inner battle and I wanted to hear about it. 

With Aidan the NFTS filmmakers managed a little better, as he reveals his upbringing in care and how he had finally found a home but the foster mother was too busy considering care as a job, over actually loving him. We sympathise with him, more so than the others. But we are not allowed enough time to follow his journey through. We want to hear about why he could not get on in a real bed and why he chose to go back to being homeless. Perhaps a VoiceOver would help us to fill in the gaps?

It was a good effort. Director Tim Knight had the contributors to give a good story, they just don't quite get round to telling it during the 27min duration.