Anticipating Sarah

This short film begins with a soldier from WWII reading a letter from his sweetheart. They have never met, but he's in love. Soon afterwards, when the war ends, he anxiously goes to the meeting place in America where they will finally get to see each other.

ANTICIPATING SARAH is a rather frustrating film to watch. On one hand, the film has a very professional look. The acting and music are just lovely and the picture really was able to pull the viewer into the story. On the other, after all this buildup, the film ended very, very prematurely. The usual twist or satisfying ending wasn't exactly there and instead the whole thing seemed to just fizzle out at the end. However, considering how professional the entire film looked, I am reasonably confident that subsequent films from these people will only get better--after all, they definitely have learned the basics of good film making.

FYI--The helmet worn by the male lead is not correct (it's either from WWI or the very beginning of WWII) but this is certainly not a serious problem. It just confused me a bit at first.

This short was in part four of the "Short Cinema Journal"--a film I rented from Netflix but which appears to have originally been a monthly film series for people who like mediocre modern short films AND love to have the DVD chock full of commercials. I have so far tried two of the Journal's DVDs and felt enraged at the horrible way that a viewer needs to navigate the disk in order to see the films. Talk about an over-produced and overly complicated way of doing this! While I have and will continue to see as many shorts as I can, I really doubt if I'll bother with the Journals because of these factors.

The story is about a young man at war who is exchanging letters with a woman he has never seen and falls in love with her; when he returns from war they finally meet.

The film is well produced, acted, and set, but the plot is way too predictable (even if you've never heard the story before.) A bit of a twist would have been nice.

Nonetheless, if you get a chance to see this, it'd be worth a look. Certainly a positive work for all the crew to include in their portfolios.