Spoilers below.
The coming-of-age genre loves to make its characters choose between a relationship and their future. We’re seeing it in The Summer I Turned Pretty, with Belly abandoning plans to study in Paris to stay with her fiancé, Jeremiah (who didn’t want her to go anyway). Earlier this spring, we saw it in Forever: Justin wants to go with Keisha to Howard University, but she’d prefer that they have their own experiences. There are many other instances of this in pop culture, usually with the girl choosing a boy over her dreams. Cosmopolitan recently pointed out examples in The Hills, Boy Meets World, and more. (And let’s not forget how Nate became the villain in The Devil Wears Prada for trying to keep Andy from her job.) Watching these relationships as the audience, it might be easy to scold the women who choose the boy. Like, Girl, stand up! He is not worth it! My Oxford Year, Netflix’s newest romance film, complicates that decision with life-or-death stakes.
The movie stars Sofia Carson (the streamer’s go-to leading lady) as Anna, a big dreamer and type-A planner who takes a gap year to fulfill her childhood fantasy of attending Oxford University. Once she’s done with her poetry course, she has a high-profile finance job waiting for her back in the States. But then she falls for her hot professor, Jamie Davenport (Queen Charlotte’s Corey Mylchreest), who messes up her plans. Despite their undeniable mutual attraction, Jamie wants to avoid getting into a committed relationship with Anna. Not because he’s emotionally unavailable, but because he has terminal cancer and doesn’t want to break her heart. He has even opted to not take further treatment, despite his family’s objections. Still, he and Anna can’t resist each other, and they go for it anyway.
They are so in love that Anna finds herself facing a critical decision: Should she still go back to the U.S. for her Goldman Sachs job, or should she stay in the U.K. with Jamie to help take care of him and keep him company for however much time he has left? An integral factor in this situation is that Jamie vehemently does not want Anna to stay. She has such a bright future ahead of her; she shouldn’t give it up for a guy she just met and who won’t be around for much longer. “I would never make you make such a bloody stupid decision,” he tells her, also pointing out that there isn’t much career growth if she decides to work at the university. When Anna tells him she isn’t taking the Goldman job after all, he’s furious.
But Anna and Jamie’s relationship has been quite eye-opening for her. Throughout their time together, her lifelong love for poetry and literature has only deepened. She expresses her dreams of traveling the world. She loves the Henry David Thoreau quote, “Live life deliberately,” which has long inspired her to plan out every detail of her trajectory. But after encountering Jamie and his carpe diem approach to life, she realizes perhaps Thoreau was referring to something else. Living deliberately is not about planning everything, but about “being definite about every small moment,” she says in the film. And what is life but not a series of moments?
At the end of My Oxford Year, Anna and Jamie make up from their argument and spend the night together, but Anna wakes up to find Jamie nearly unconscious. He has a critical case of pneumonia that will likely kill him. At the hospital, the doctor wants to discuss next steps for treatment with Jamie’s parents, but they decide to honor his wishes and let nature take its course. Back at home, lying on what is now Jamie’s death bed, he and Anna talk about her future. Now that she’s stayed in the U.K., she can go on the “grand tour” she’s always dreamed of. The itinerary includes Amsterdam, to see a hidden chapel; Paris, to get drunk by the Seine; Venice, to ride a gondola; and Greece, to see the Temple of Poseidon and swim in the Aegean Sea.
As Anna plans her travels aloud, a tender montage of her and Jamie visiting these sites appears onscreen—until, in the end, it’s revealed that she was alone the whole time. When the film jumps back to Jamie and Anna on the bed, it appears he has died right beside her. She might not have Jamie physically with her when she goes on her dream trip, but she does take his lessons and worldview with her as she moves forward with her life. As Carson previously told ELLE, their relationship “changes her forever and for the better,” because she learns to “lean into what brings her joy and what always was the love of her life, and that was poetry and literature.” Sure enough, in the film’s final scene, Anna is now a professor at Oxford, teaching a poetry class of her own.
My Oxford Year argues that choosing your love is choosing your future—especially if that love helps you achieve the dreams you were too scared to chase. In a sense, it eliminates the decision entirely, because you can have both; you can have your cake and eat it too. It’s very romantic, it’s melodramatic, and it’s definitely rare, but it works in the context of a sappy, two-hour Netflix film with Sylvia Plath references and idyllic English settings. But in the cases of Belly from TSITP or Lauren from The Hills (who are both “the girl who didn’t go to Paris”), or any experience rooted deeper in reality, it’s not quite the same. Those decisions, and the men involved, require a little more… deliberating.
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