My Oxford Year by Netflix tries to offer a sweeping courtship around the prestigious setting of another famous university, Oxford but falls prey to a torrent of overused romantic drama tropes. It is not, but what should have been a fine story of an American student, Ella, who is carving out a new world in a new academic institution also turns into a Saiyaara-coded weepy, somewhere not-her-own, but the British-accented version of a typical Mohit Suri film.
The movie is more concerned with manufactured emotional highs and lows than anything like actual character development, and makes the viewer feel like they have seen it before, instead of having a deep connection with it.
Academic Ambition Vs. Romantic Obsession
The composition of Ella in the setting of arriving at Oxford lays out the early beginnings of Ella as trying to earn a Rhodes Scholarship and also how committed Ella is to political study. She can be observed to be attending lectures enthusiastically and being able to cope with new intellectual experiences. But the story quickly jumps to her almost singularly focused whirlwind romance with Jamie, a local, boyishly beautiful lad.
When they meet during a party, it does not take much time before their relationship becomes serious and all-encompassing. Illustrating, they are exchanging intense intimacies and making big pronouncements of love in only a matter of days and any meaningful insight into Ella as a student or her relationship with other students outside the group of Jamie. Her academic interests now take second place in her life to their titillating, but in the end, predictable affair.
The Inevitable Melodramatic Twist
The central life-changing secret shared by Jamie is highly used in the film that is then mirrored at a pivotal point to give maximum impact. This secret, which is made up of a serious illness is the main conflict in the story that places Ella in the position of a poor partner.
The revelation results in a number of very emotional exchanges and the weeping scenes, aimed at closely seeking sympathy of the watchers. The fact that Jamie is reluctant to tell Ella about his condition, only to overdramatize his discovery by Ella in a rather melodramatic way, is a calculated decision to enhance the melodramatic material closely corresponding to the trope of the doomed romance without much of a diversified experience along with the subtle emotional and emotional development.
Also Read: The Return of the Romcom: Five Films Signaling the Genre’s Comeback
