Candidat à l'amour

I found this Hallmark romance to be quite charming, and I recommend it for anyone who likes an understated love story.

Noah McManus (Jesse Metcalfe) is a young man whose life goes off track when his job and his engagement both disintegrate on the same day. He travels to a small town on Cape Cod and checks into the cozy B&B where he was to have stayed with his fiancée. There, he becomes involved in the politics of the town and the lives of its residents.

The acting of the two leads, McManus and Natalie Lisinska, feels genuine and appealing. Their relationship grows organically out of their interactions. And the film's incidental music greatly contributes to the tone of the story.

Like many Hallmark stories, it champions small-town virtues and the value of personal interactions. The people who inhabit the coastal town feel like part of a hospitable landscape.

Noah MacManus is a rising young politician, but when the Boston politician he is an aide to melts down in the middle of an election, the U.S. Senator he is set to work for gets caught in a scandal and the woman he has been engaged to for eight seconds cheats on him, he winds up on Cape Cod with his dog and finds love and purpose.

There's little that's wrong in this by-the-numbers TV romcom, except for a lack of good jokes. Everyone is good looking, everyone speaks their lines and does a decent job acting, and Toronto in Canada stands in nicely for a picturesque small town in Massachussetts. The whole effect is a decent enough time-waster for the Hallmark Channel, if little more. Still, visually it's pleasant enough and if your attention wanders for a minute or two, you won't be terribly confused when you start watching again.

I don't care what anyone says this is a very good movie and me and the wife loved it, even though it did have a few flaws. Still well worth watching. James Welch Henderson, Arkansas 3/2/2021

How can you make a movie, claiming to take place in Cape Cod, when clearly it was shot elsewhere? Only one character actually has a New England Accent! The movie is likable and so are the characters in it, but a little more attention to detail and continuity, would have gone a long way. If you're looking for a movie that involves Cape Cod, this is not it.

I'd only seen Jesse Metcalfe in Desperate Housewives which didn't really flex his acting muscles, so I was a little wary of watching a film with him in the lead role. I was pleasantly surprised, he's a cracking actor and really rather wasted in lesser roles. He has bags of screen presence in this little film which is visually stunning in terms of scenery, certainly a great advert for the area. Someone already drew comparisons with the Capra-esque ideals of little man against the big corporation and this definitely has the charm and heart of a much older film. A sweet supporting cast of quirky characters make this a nice cosy watch for a Sunday afternoon.