Loving Annabelle

The thing I remember most clearly about watching Loving Annabelle was thinking to myself that the style and costuming looked very specifically 2006. I then looked it up and confirmed that yes, this movie was made in 2006. Loving Annabelle is a pretty good time capsule of specifically the year 2006. So at least it has that going for it.

Loving Annabelle is about Annabelle, who goes to an all girls’ boarding school. Despite opportunity for gay stuff happening with girls her own age, Annabelle instead develops a crush on her teacher, Simone. She spends most of the movie trying to have her affections be reciprocated, which eventually they are. But even in this scenario, where the movie did everything in its power to make the whole student/teacher relationship be not creepy, that shit’s still illegal.

Loving Annabelle spent a whole lot of time and effort trying to make this relationship not icky. It is Annabelle pursuing Simone, not the other way around. Because the other way around is automatically a no-no. As a character, Annabelle shows maturity in various scenes and is considered “wise beyond her years”. I think in this context that’s code for she’s already had lesbian experiences. Another contributing factor to that is that the actress who plays Annabelle in no way looks like a teenager. As for Simone, she’s shown a few times to be immature and inexperienced whereas Annabelle already knows the ways of being gay. The relationship also builds platonically for quite some time before turning sexual which also helps. They do try and mostly succeed in developing Simone and Annabelle individually as well as as a couple.

However, at the end of the day, no matter how hard you try, the concept of a teenager engaging in a relationship with a teacher is just always gonna be not great. Still, at least Loving Annabelle was aware that there did need to be some work done to at minimize the Not Great factor.

Beyond my issue with the main romance of the piece, Loving Annabelle falls hard into tropes and cliches. The script for this is predictable and lacks necessary maturity. Character angst comes up sort of randomly and at too high of a level. That in particular is really frustrating. They do Annabelle to be a mature character for this story to work. But every once and a while, she’ll do a total backslide into super ansgty teenager. In those scenes, I just really wanted Simone or another adult character to tell her to grow up. Yet such a scene of Annabelle acting melodramatic and immature is when Simone kisses her for the first time. In general, Loving Annabelle feels like the script was written by someone too young to understand how mature adults work or why the world needs them.

Loving Annabelle just has no budget to work with either. The movie was shot the movie in 12 days. This is just too short an amount of time to get the best quality of a finished product. I feel a little bad for ragging on them but the budget and time constraints but it really does show through in the finished product.

I do think there is an audience for Loving Annabelle. There are people who genuinely enjoy the tropes and melodrama of a romance novel or piece of fan fiction. Loving Annabelle would satisfy these people. But I am not such a person. The immature script, lack of budget and questionable basic concept of this movie all prevent it from being something I can recommend. If you are a person who liked this movie or think you might like it, that’s totally valid and I am glad this movie sparked joy for you. But personally, all Loving Annabelle sparked in me was a mixture of listless disappointment and nostalgia for 2006.

Overall rating: 4.3/10

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