Look Both Ways is slight, simple and surprisingly perceptive

One of the first alternate-reality films I watched as a child was the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring Sliding Doors (1998), which in itself was a rom-com-styled ode to Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1987). Sliding Doors featured two divergent narratives of a woman’s life, based on whether she catches a train or misses it one morning. The gimmick was that the storyline that looked like the “right” one all along becomes a slow-burning tragedy, while the less attractive path slowly morphs into the scenic route to happiness.

Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu’s Look Both Ways replaces the sliding doors of a train with a pregnancy test on graduation night. In one storyline, a stricken Natalie is pregnant and decides to move back into her parents’ home to bring up her baby; her future is on hold, while the drummer-drifter father of her baby, Gabe, lends her his full support. In the other storyline, a relieved Natalie tests negative and goes forth with her dreams of moving to Los Angeles with her best friend, finding love on her own terms and working at a computer animation studio. The former looks like a limp compromise; the latter looks like a free-spirited romp towards a limitless future. Fortunately, despite teasing with signs of the tortoise-and-hare syndrome, Look Both Ways makes one crucial update to the parallel-universe template – it refuses to discriminate between the different languages of young womanhood. It suggests that, no matter what the ebbs and flows of a journey (downside-up or upside-down), all rocky roads lead to the sunrise of self-fulfillment.

As a result, we get two coming-of-age stories at the cost of one – joined at the hip through a charming lead turn by Lili Reinhart, whose uncanny resemblance to both Alicia Silverstone and the late Brittany Murphy only adds to the film’s disarming sense of poignance. Reinhart shines as Natalie and the two faces within her, seamlessly traversing narratives with the grace of an old-school rom-com heroine. Natalie is initially presented as the sort of plan-making girl who wouldn’t think twice before having an abortion. But her change of heart feels more like a reclamation of control than a copout, preventing the film from succumbing to social propaganda, thanks in no small measure to the actress’ shape-shifting performance. She doesn’t play the two as separate characters per se, and yet the transitions between both storylines feel seamless. Whether she’s struggling to develop as an artist in the big city or arguing with Gabe about babysitting in Texas, Reinhart channels the essence of a single character split into two. She reiterates the film’s ironic “pro-(your)-choice” theme, and its rewarding of a woman who isn’t afraid to befriend the bridge between faith and fate.

I like the corny little metaphors integrated into the film’s design. Take Natalie’s passion for animation, for instance. At one point, non-pregnant Natalie – who works as a Devil-Wears-Prada-ish assistant to a female studio boss – berates her date for wondering why enough animated films don’t have live-action remakes. “It’s like trying to tell somebody about the dream you had last night,” she says, not least because Look Both Ways itself manifests this duality. One Natalie is stuck in a bleak live-action remake of the dreams she once had; the magic is lost in translation. What she doesn’t understand yet, though, is that it’s not about mediums so much as languages. His response – “you don’t think there’s merit in telling a story two different ways?” – typifies the film’s stance. She’s leading the same life in two different ways.

Look Both Ways perhaps takes too long to make this point, almost getting lost in the cross-cutting and moral syncing between both the scenarios. But even when it lags for a while – especially when Natalie sets out to find her own artistic voice – it gets the basics right. The background score, for one, is excellent – it has a melancholic fluidity that reveals the montage-like rhythms of living. The two men in Natalie’s lives are affable without being woke figments of imagination: Gabe cedes the agency of the story to his pregnant friend early on, while Jake is emblematic of that rakish first-love-in-a-new-city vibe. Natalie’s parents, too, are the sort of unobtrusive and funny older characters who are cool by virtue of being human rather than liberal. Put together, they paint a sweet portrait of the vacuum separating – and joining – the what-ifs to the what-could-have-beens. The message of the film – that predestinations are stronger than destinations – is almost deludedly optimistic. Yet it’s one worth embracing, particularly in this restless age of millennial strife and striving.

Rating: 3.5/5

Look Both Ways is streaming on Netflix

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.

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