The latest example is The Drama, in which Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play Emma and Charlie, a young couple in love. They’re engaged to be married, busy with all the pregame mishigas these events entail—meeting with photographers, learning prescribed dance moves, writing little speeches of adoration for one another—and their closest friends, Rachel and Mike (Alana Haim and Mamoudou Athie), also a couple, are with them every step of the way. We see, in the first scene, how Emma and Charlie met cute in a café, but even that first encounter is grounded in deception: Charlie spots Emma reading a book; he takes a furtive photo of its cover and does a quick search on his phone to glean a few details about it. He then approaches Emma, burbling about how much he loves that same book, though obviously he hasn’t read it. Emma ignores him at first—or so he thinks. But it turns out, as she explains when he’s finally able to get her attention, that she’s deaf in one ear (there’s an earbud in the other). Then she smiles at him so radiantly that you see she’s fully buying his mini-con, even though, it’s later revealed, he never does read that book. The couple lives in an enviable flat lined with filled bookshelves, the sort of thing you rarely see in movies anymore, and certainly not in real estate photos. The suggestion is that these are people who live with and actually read books—or maybe one of them does, and we can guess that it’s Emma.
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