Mark (Brant Daugherty) is a star reporter, known as Moody Mark by his colleagues for his seriousness about his profession. Lea (Jaicy Elliot) is a copyeditor at the same paper who yearns to write her own feature story. She soon gets her chance (and I'm a little fuzzy on the details here, as this is a slightly more elaborate background story than usual for Hallmark, so bear with me). She is intrigued by an old painting in a local museum done by an anonymous French painter only known by "F," of a woman in the snow walking through a French Christmas market. At an antique store, Lea buys a music box which contains a sketch done in the same style as the painting, and pages from a journal by someone named Francois. The journal seems to tell a magical love story of F and a woman named Ana who met at a Christmas market in Rouen, France in the mid 50s. The painting is of Ana, but the last pages of the journal are missing, so Lea proposes to her editor, who is desperately searching for a lead holiday story, that she go to France to try and find out what happened to this couple. The editor says yes, but makes her pair up with Mark, who sees the story as beneath his talent. The two don't exactly hit it off—she's powered by instinct, whereas he privileges fact-gathering; she's green and he, as has been established, is moody. At their hotel, a charming little girl named Sophie starts to soften up Mark by telling him stories about magical Christmas gnomes, and Lea begins to see the advantages of using hard research to get her story. There is a legend that the Christmas market brings lovers together, and Lea hopes her story will bear that out. But as they track the movements of Francois and Ana through the village, their story becomes less magical. The trail leads to a church where the two were supposed to meet and elope, but Mark finds evidence that Ana stood Francois up, so Lea's big story winds up with an unhappy ending. At first, Mark hides this from Lea so as not to disappoint her, but when she finds out the truth, she feels angry and disrespected. Can any good come of this situation?
Hypocritical confession time. I often complain that Hallmark Christmas movies are all the same. This one is, as others I've reviewed recently, different (if not necessarily original) and my first reaction to it was negative. I am a big fan of the handsome Brant Daugherty who is unfailingly appealing and charming, but his romantic opposite, Jaicy Elliot, breaks the mold of the Christmas female lead: she is plump and short and plain-looking, and I'm a bit embarrassed to say that her physical qualities put me off at first. She seems more like the best friend than the heroine; her dialogue delivery is drab and monotone, and there is little chemistry between the two leads. But eventually, I came to realize that this might be part of the point of the movie. Romantic sparks, which usually start flying by the 15-minute mark, never really happened. Until the last 10 minutes, there is no real indication that these two will or should get together. When they do get together, it seems more like a lazy way to meet the genre expectations. If you approach it as a story not of romance but of mutual education (she learns about reporting, he learns that intuition can be useful), it works better. I found their eventual last-minute kiss to be unrealistic, in part because the requisite sparks never flew. Having said all that, I'd still recommend this. Daugherty is always welcome in my home; there is a minor random Black gay character (Michael Obiora) who is fun for the 2 minutes of screen time he has; the bulk of the film's exteriors appear to have been shot on location in France which adds to the atmosphere; the music box magically plays a nice role in the conclusion. Brant and his wife Kimberly wrote the script, which I think is better than the overall execution it gets, though as I noted above, the backstory, which is basically the McGuffin, is a little convoluted. Give it a chance—the parts start working together pretty well by the halfway point. [Hallmark]
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