A single dad who dreams of making it as a novelist finds a new muse in the form of a mysterious yoga instructor in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Sunshine.
After directing three short films (Toasted, The Passive-Aggressive Presence and On Becoming a Man) Kevin Resnick has turned his hand to creating a feature film for the first time with Cloudy with a Chance of Sunshine. As well as taking up the directorial reigns, Resnick also wrote and produced the film alongside Rebecca Norris, as well as playing the main character.
Ben (Resnick) is a single father to a young daughter and an all-round nice guy. He spends his nights acting out bedtime stories for his adorable child, but during the day he can be found in an office writing instructions for “mundane everyday items”. It’s fair to say, he finds little fulfilment in his vocation, and to add some salt to the wound, his employer is also rather unpleasant. What Ben really wants to do is to become a novelist, and everyday he visits a coffee shop in order to start his first book without his wife/writing partner, but he can’t find a way to get going and put pen to paper. Instead, he quietly admires another patron who, like Ben, visits the coffee shop on a daily basis.
Then, one day, after a particularly difficult day in the office, Ben returns home to find the woman from the coffee shop, in his kitchen preparing a vegetable lasagne for him, his daughter and his womanising father. She introduces herself as Sunshine (Sarah Navratil) and soon invites him to her home in order to help him write his book. After not being with a woman for seven years, Ben is in two-minds about going to Sunshine’s for a “date”, but he is shocked to find a yoga class taking place at her home when he arrives. A class made up of some strange and eccentric individuals indeed.
Soon, Sunshine starts to inject some more light and love into Ben’s life and we, as the audience, get to go along with the ride in this enjoyable romp.
Resnick and Norris do well in creating a romantic comedy without a huge budget and managing to avoid being too cliché and cheesy. The script has some great dialogue with some funny one-liners and both Resnick and Navratil make for some likeable lead actors. The cinematography is done well and the film is graded brightly to fit the mood of the story perfectly.
Cloudy with a Chance of Sunshine is a fun and joyful movie about family, getting over the death of a partner and the beginning of relationships. Ben and Sunshine make for one of the most unusual and adhering on-screen couples in quite a while.
Trailer: Cloudy With A Chance of Sunshine from Kevin Resnick on Vimeo.
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