The Seasons: four love stories

Directed by Paul Schwartz, The Seasons: four love stories details the romantic exploits of several characters, including Mike Keller’ Nick and Kathleen Simmonds’ Samantha, through each of the four seasons. It’s promising subject matter that’s employed to periodically passable yet mostly interminable effect by Schwartz, as the filmmaker, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a perpetually underwhelming (and entirely amateurish) endeavor that contains few, if any, elements designed to capture the viewer’s interest – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by, for example, community-theater-level performances and a script overflowing with stagy, on-the-nose instances of dialogue (eg “you have to open your heart; you can’t stay closed off forever”). And although Schwartz has peppered the proceedings with a very small handful of relatively agreeable attributes, including a comparatively charming subplot revolving around two elderly characters reuniting after 60 years, The Seasons: four love stories builds towards a decidedly anticlimactic closing stretch that’s hardly as satisfying (or impactful) as Schwartz as obviously intended – which does, in the end, cement the picture’s place as a well-intentioned and thoroughly earnest misfire that often feels like it should be much, much better.

*1/2 out of ****