They don’t exactly meet cute. More like meet shrouded.
But it’s appropriate in “Restless” that boy meets girl at a funeral. In this relationship, death is the chief rival.
And it’s the chief product differential in Gus Van Sant’s otherwise-familiar doomed romance that – for most of the story, anyway – boy and girl are OK with that.
Enoch (Henry Hopper) is awkward and morbid, for good reason: His parents were killed in a car crash that left him in a coma for three months. He’s dropped out of life, spending his days going to the funerals of strangers and playing Battleship with Hiroshi (Ryo Kase), the ghost of a World War II kamikaze pilot.
At one such funeral, he meets Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), a vibrant, to-the-point girl who, he quickly learns, is being treated for cancer. Her love of life and shared attitude about death wear down his resistance, and soon they are inseparable. That she’s just been given three months to live doesn’t seem to be a big deal.