Nobody's Heart - What We Know So Far

Some say that romance in Hollywood isn't what it used to be. But, true as that may or may not be, it's certainly not for lack of material. Even if everyone stopped falling in love today, the trove of great, stirring love stories hailing from both literature and real life, just waiting in the wings to be given the big screen treatment, would be enough to fuel decades of great romantic cinema.

It's particularly exciting, therefore, that we'll soon be getting a starry romance film that taps into both literary and veridical stories for inspiration, and promises not to shy away from the erotic complexity and abrasiveness of either. For all those who have ever yearned for torrid, unusual, international love affairs amidst the social and political turmoil of the Iberian Peninsula in the 1930s — or had any other less historically specific romantic reveries — here comes "Nobody's Heart." Read on to find out everything we know so far about the upcoming film.

"Nobody's Heart" is being directed by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, a highly prolific auteur who has directed innumerable films, shorts, and TV series over the course of her more than 30 years long career. Recently, she directed the Emily Mortimer-starring movie "The Bookshop," an acclaimed seaside drama that took home Goyas — basically Spain's Academy Awards — for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay (via IMDb).

According to Deadline, the film is being handled by English sales house WestEnd Films and introduced at the ongoing 2021 American Film Market, with CAA Media Finance in charge of North America distribution deals. Even as sales are brokered, however, it will probably be a while until we get an official release date for Coixet's new film, but all of the official information out so far is that "Nobody's Heart" will begin shooting in January 2022.

Looking back, "The Bookshop" began shooting in August 2016 (via Screen Daily) and premiered a full year later at the Valladolid International Film Festival in October 2017. So if Coixet and her crew stick to a similar timetable on this project, it could take until 2023 for the film to premiere — perhaps at Berlinale, where Coixet has previously found success.

The announcement of "Nobody's Heart" by Deadline was accompanied by the unveiling of its two lead actors, and they're very much worth getting excited about. The film will be headlined by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who will play protagonist Lily, a woman grieving the death of her husband who forms a sudden connection with a mysterious man. That man, presumably, is the role that's being played by the film's other announced star, Édgar Ramírez.

A darling of indie cinema for some time now, Mbatha-Raw is on an upswing of visibility after playing one of the main roles in Disney+'s "Loki," and "Nobody's Heart" will hopefully serve as yet another showcase of her immense skill and sensitivity as a performer. Ramírez, meanwhile, has appeared in everything from "Zero Dark Thirty" to "American Crime Story" to "Jungle Cruise" over the past decade, and Coixet's film just might be the big dramatic vehicle we've been waiting for since his breakthrough in Olivier Assayas' "Carlos."

"Nobody's Heart" is based on the short story "Cork" by Scottish writer William Boyd, who is handling screenwriting duties for the adaptation himself, as per Deadline. Originally published in 1990 by the celebrated literary magazine Granta, "Cork" consists of an English woman's recollections of her time spent living in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 1930s, and having yearly, passionate encounters with a Portuguese poet.

Identified by Deadline as being based on the life of Fernando Pessoa, "Nobody's Heart" will follow the same woman, Lily Campendonc, in the wake of her husband's "sudden and devastating" passing. "She inherits his cork factory and begins to form an unexpected, highly charged relationship with his enigmatic co-worker, igniting repressed imagination and passion, and discovering unknown truths about both herself and her late husband," the official synopsis reads.

Isabel Coixet further described the project as "a fascinating, twisted and sexually charged love story between two characters sharing a unique passion," and noted that "there's a hunger out there for these stories." "Hunger" does, indeed, seem like a fitting word for the promise of a lurid romance between Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Édgar Ramírez set in 1930s-era Lisbon.