Breaking the Circle was the bestseller that put Colleen Hoover on the map, a women’s writer who has exploded into the US charts in recent years, with 20 million books sold. Hoover reigns on the New York Times bestseller lists, on supermarket bookshelves and on social media thanks to her melodramas full of sex, trauma and domestic abuse. Breaking the Circle (2016), her most personal novel, inspired by the gender-based violence suffered by her mother, sold four million books and the rights to its adaptation to Hollywood.
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The result of that profitable transaction reaches the screens with actress Blake Lively as the protagonist (and producer) of a drama about abuse under the codes of a sentimental and romantic narrative typical of the serial novel. Can fear be painted without giving up the pink palette? Something like this is proposed by this commercial film aimed, from the start, at the millions of readers of Hoover.
The story is about Lily Bloom, a woman marked since childhood by a dysfunctional home due to her father’s violence, who decides to open a flower shop in Boston. There, among bouquets of roses, she will meet a Don Juan neurosurgeon played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni, to whom we owe a few romantic teenage dramas (Five Feet Apart, 2019; Clouds, 2020) that will also be reflected here, when the past of Lily Bloom, her high school sweetheart, becomes present and with it the surgeon’s jealousy.
Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, in the film ‘Breaking the Circle’. Sony Pictures
If Breaking the Circle holds up, it is thanks to Blake Lively and her characterisation, which is so exaggerated in its romanticism that it has its charms, with that impossible flower shop, or with her way of dressing, always loaded with trinkets to underline her dreamy view of life. Entangled in a relationship with a jealous and violent narcissist, the film shows her slow awakening in a way that is consistent with her character and her loving idealism. It is interesting, above all, how the turning point of abuse is portrayed as something confusing in her head, with the subtext of self-deception always present. Everything seems perfect, while the couple toasts in a very cheesy way with a mimosa cocktail, when the first slap arrives in a strange, accelerated and unexpected way.
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There is no idealisation of violence (something that critics object to in Hoover’s novels), but there is evidence that the blows (psychological or physical) are too often portrayed as an accident for which no one was to blame. In this sense, the film leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination, it fulfils its didactic and instructive function, things are finally made clear and the famous circle is broken, even if it is surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
Break the circle
Address: Justin Baldoni.
Interpreters: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar.
Gender: romantic. United States, 2024.
Duration: 130 minutes.
Release: August 9.
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