The film of John Green’s bestseller is guaranteed to end in tears. After all, it’s about two teenagers stricken with cancer. But what kind of tears? Will we come to admire and empathise with its two leads or will we leave the cinema queasily convinced we’ve been manipulated into feeling for them because they’re sick? Show It’s the kind of question that British filmmakers tend to handle more easily than their American counterparts. Steeped in the traditions of social realism, they’re experienced straight talkers, adept at the art of undercutting candour with understatement and bitterness with gallows humour. It’s an art that Green, too, has studied and the film’s director, Josh Boone, is working from a script that cleaves closely to his book. Nonetheless, understatement is an early casualty. The action is hardly underway when candour starts sliding into earnestness. While the film’s star, Shailene Woodley (Divergent), is doing her laconic best to keep the tone on track, it’s clear that nobody has briefed Laura Dern on this strategy. Cast as Woodley’s over-protective mother Frannie, she puts so much hand and elbow work into her performance that she seems at risk of taking off and fluttering from the set. Woodley’s Hazel suffers a form of cancer that has so damaged her lungs she must drag an oxygen tank around with her. She faces this predicament with stoic aplomb, towing the tank on a trolley as if it were a piece of baggage, which it is. But, understandably, she doesn’t feel like socialising until Frannie persuades her to sign up to a local support group. Here she meets Gus Waters (Ansel Elgort, also from Divergent), an urbane 18 year-old who has lost a leg to the disease. Now his cancer is in remission and he’s joined the group to keep a friend company. Foundering flow: Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars. From these multiple tragedies, Green’s book constructs a surprisingly upbeat scenario that has Hazel and Gus fall for one another while bonding over music, movies and all the other things that interest them. In particular, she introduces him to a novel about a girl who feels exactly as she does about cancer and what it’s done to her life. And the plot’s next stage takes them to Amsterdam to meet the book’s reclusive Dutch author (Willem Dafoe in neurotic over-drive). By this point, the strain is really showing and Woodley and Elgort, who played brother and sister in Divergent, are having a lot of trouble keeping up the flow of bright banter that is supposed to be animating their burgeoning romance. He’s miscast. His baby-faced handsomeness and over-worked smile can’t rise to the precocious air of worldliness that Gus is meant to exude and Woodley’s air of composure is rapidly dissolving to the point where she’s punctuating every sentence with “Oh my God!” Do the tears flow? It’s hard to stop them but it’s a reflex action, triggered by the tragic conjunction of cancer and the young, rather than any sense of kinship with the particular pair you’ve been watching on screen. But if what you’re looking for is a long-term relationship, what you put out is going to influence what you’ll bring in. If you still haven’t processed it, you are probably not ready to enter a serious relationship because you don’t know what you’re going to learn from that process.Also, you who are attracted to might change throughout this process. Maybe looks are not as important to you and you’re looking for compassion. Or before, you wanted someone more playful, but now you want someone who’s driven.The experience of cancer teaches us many things and can influence who you want to partner up with. 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