The Unrequited Life of Farrah Bruce

The Unrequited Life of Farrah Bruce (Farrah) was conceived on a wintry walk in the park with my friend and fellow writer as we dissected her recent painful heartbreak. She had fallen hard and fast for a boy and it had ended with similar intensity three weeks later.

The Unrequited Life of Farrah Bruce explores the complex chaos of being in your early twenties, focusing on two prominent struggles: romance and mental health. Youth is often accompanied by dreamy optimism, and the fallout from unmet expectations can feel truly tragic. Farrah explores this through a comedic lens, forcing its titular character to remove her rose-tinted glasses and confront the reality of her emotional attachments. 

Farrah considers ‘love’ in a time when, despite being more connected than ever, many of us feel profoundly alone, endlessly searching for ‘the one’. The fallacy of the perfect soul mate is a key theme of Farrah — expecting an idealised version of love, free from the emotional labour a real relationship requires. 

We live in the era of ‘growth’: defined by therapy and self-help strategies. Farrah touches on the intangibility of emotional growth and the difficulty of truly interrupting disruptive patterns. I drew on my own experiences of therapy, particularly the elusive nature of ‘improvement’, and how easy it is to leave a therapy session and fall straight back into old habits. 

Farrah centralises the female gaze, exploring how some twenty-something women internalise and reproduce dominant narratives about love. It would be easy, but overly simplistic, to characterise our protagonist as “crazy”. Farrah embodies female fantasy: the unsaid desires of many women. This framing reflects my experience as a young woman in the film industry — it’s easy to feel our voices, experiences and sense of humour are not represented. It’s also easy to feel like you are “failing” at feminism; my goal when writing this film was to focus on the reality of lived female experience, rather than simply trying to write a “good feminist” film. This is where Farrah’s truth and humour lies — it is the story of a young woman finding herself and her voice, and it is a messy and imperfect experience, as it is in life. 

For Farrah wanted to offer a fresh perspective on the breakup story, one that explores our characters deepest secrets, most damaging flaws but presents them in a way that is entirely relatable and, well, hilarious. We want our audience to be simultaneously entertained and repulsed at our characters, while also seeing themselves reflected back at them. Ultimately, by telling this story as a comedy we believe it will leave a more lasting impression whilst allowing the audience to reflect on their own relationship to love.