Filled with nostalgia and great music, this Gen X romantic drama hits the right notes
Mix Tape ★★★
Mix Tape is all about the wonder. First love, favourite songs and inescapable heartbreak are the building blocks of this Irish-Australian romantic drama. Ricocheting between past and present, the teenage protagonists and their middle-aged successors, these four hour-long episodes have an inexorable momentum.
Teresa Palmer as Alison in Mix Tape, an Irish-Australian romantic drama.
It’s not subtle, but it’s effective. Yes, the plot forcefully pushes these characters into bitter circumstances, but there’s also a deeper recognition that sometimes a gesture, or an unspoken decision, or a great song, can add more than carefully crafted detail.
Sheffield, England, 1989: lanky teen Dan O’Toole (Rory Walton-Smith) sights high school classmate Alison Connor (Florence Hunt) across the room at a house party. New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle is playing: “I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue.” Cut to the present day and Dan (Jim Sturgess) is a music journalist, still based in Sheffield and married with a son to Katja (Sara Soulie), while Alison (Teresa Palmer) is getting far more sunshine in Sydney, mother of two daughters and married to surgeon Michael (Ben Lawson).
Florence Hunt and Rory Walton-Smith play smitten teens Alison and Dan in Mix Tape.
Why aren’t they together? When will they get back together? Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart is obviously cued up, but this adaptation of Jane Sanderson’s 2020 novel knows, as does the viewer, that Dan and Alison are meant to be together, both as a means of healing and a wellspring of happiness. Their children are mostly leaving home and their partners are slightly off – the emphasis Michael puts on the “my” in “you’re my wife” lingers uneasily.
“You never forget the boy who makes you your first mix-tape,” Alison tells her daughter, Stella (Julia Savage), which means more once Alison explains to her Spotify-era child what a mix-tape is. Irish writer Jo Spain (Harry Wild) and Australian director Lucy Gaffy (Irreverent) treat love and longing as a magnetic force. It draws the teenagers together, with montages and shared reveries that come with an impeccable soundtrack – Psychedelic Furs, The Church, The Cure – and immaculate production design for the adolescent bedrooms.
There’s a degree of nostalgia, which some will happily succumb to, but this Gen X mix of Nick Hornby and Nancy Meyers (Alison’s home has Bondi Beach views) also liberally applies tragic circumstances, especially in Alison’s case, to divide the young lovers. There are tendrils of other shows, including the reckoning with unspoken trauma, the meaning behind a midlife crisis and the technical wonder that was a dual cassette deck, but fulfilling kismet is the goal. And when that happens, shared gazes and the right song do the job.
Mix Tape premieres on June 12 at 8.30pm on Binge and Foxtel.
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