As a Showcase for Its Star, ‘Love Always’ Finds a Niche

“Love Always” is no more than a minor accomplishment, but it does build to an unexpected and rewarding conclusion and serves as an effective showcase for vibrant and attractive Marisa Ryan. Ryan manages to be engaging even as the film wavers under first-time director Jude Pauline Eberhard.

There was probably a better picture to be made from “Finding Signs,” a novel written by Sharlene Baker, who adapted it to the screen with Eberhard.

Ryan’s Julia is a young Spokane actress caught up in a romance with law student Mark (Michael Reilly Burke) but is not getting anywhere in her career and is not ready to settle down. She lands in San Diego, where, after an interval, she receives a postcard from Mark saying that he’s passed the bar and asking her to come back and marry him. Still unsure, she nevertheless decides to see him at least “one more time.”

Mark’s proposal sets up the film’s key gimmick, which is to present Julia as that rarity, a female on the road--especially one as pretty as Julia. No Greyhound for her, Julia hitchhikes in a thirst for experience and, perhaps unconsciously, as a way of putting off a decisive reunion with Mark.

Although it’s refreshing to see the filmmakers back away from the instant paranoia induced by the notion of a pretty woman hitchhiking alone, they carry sidestepping the dangers to the extreme. Julia winds up taking an exceedingly roundabout way to get back to Spokane and is caught up in a series of comic adventures with a bunch of largely unbelievable characters drawn with lots of shtick.

Until Spokane at last comes into view, Eberhard displays a shaky sense of geography and an even shakier sense of time and distance.

Like the character of Julia, actress Ryan seems to know how to take care of herself in front of a camera, which here is crucial. For the way Eberhard directs, too much of the time you have the sense of watching actors act instead of becoming the characters they are portraying.

Luckily, the film’s climactic sequence is so well-written and conceived that it kicks the film into high gear, but unfortunately this also has the perverse effect of making what has gone before seem all the more mediocre.

* MPAA rating: R, for language and some sexuality. Times guidelines: The film’s behind-the-credits opening sequence is too steamy for youngsters, and there is some salty language.

‘Love Always’

Marisa Ryan: Julia

Michael Reilly Burke: Mark

Moon Zappa: Mary Ellen

A Persistence of Vision Films and Legacy Releasing presentation. Director Jude Pauline Eberhard. Producer Isaac Artenstein. Executive producers Ken Branson & Coop Cooprider. Screenplay by Eberhard & Sharlene Baker; based on Baker’s novel “Finding Signs.” Cinematographer Xavier Perez Grobet. Editor Joel Goodman. Costumes Judi Sarafian. Music Jaime Valle & Anton Sanko. Production designer Mauricio de Aguinaco. Art director Eugenio Caballero. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.