Valentines Day Alternative Romance Flicks

Here at The Image Loft I like to take every opportunity I can to expand on the holiday movies in order to spare the usual seasoned classics from being tiredly wheeled out time and time again. I offered some alternative spooks for Halloween and festive treats at Christmas. Yet it is perhaps Valentines Day that this little segment is most applicable for. After all since its invention the cinema has firmly been at the route of many a budding romance (myself included.)

What, if not the cinema, inspires passions so deep inside us we want them for our own? Since it was first captured by Edison in 1896's The Kiss, love has been changed by cinema. Molded by light, glamor and beauty it is been transported across entire histories, countries and worlds and we are fueled by the spark it ignites. No longer does it imitate reality, it is reality that imitates the cinema, to a monumental effect.

So amongst the falsities, the hopes and the tragic here are six wonderful alternative films that explore the true, deeper meanings of love. 

1. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans - 1927, F.W. Murnau 

One of cinemas earliest and most classic love stories, Sunrise tells the tale of a couple who have lost their way, but through the very darkest and lowest moments find the spark that brought them together. Sunrise may look a little croaky to some with its silent era over acting and bold make up, but stick with it and this is one of the most earnest and triumphant of films. Murnau's city awakens as the lovers do, basking in light and activity, it becomes an explosive urban poem - a fever dream of love that one cannot help but be completely and utterly won over by.

2. Brief Encounter - 1945, David Lean

Perhaps putting the most famous cinematic infidelity on a Valentines Day films seems a little flawed, but I've written before on the real love that lies at the heart of Brief Encounter, one that anyone in a lasting relationship will attest to. At the heartbreaking end to middle class housewife Laura's unconsummated affair with Dr Alec Harvey she returns to her life and to her unremarkable husband, completely broken. Yet it is her unremarkable husband who saves her by giving her the most remarkable of gestures - a simple thank you for coming home.

3. Summer Interlude - 1951, Ingmar Bergman 

Although a rather cynical film, it comes from a very real place. Bergman's story of a summer romance between Marie a young dancer and student Henrik on the Swedish Archipelago is based on an intense experience the director had at 18 while vacationing with his family. The girl he was involved with would later contract polio. Therefore the bitterness that presides over the careless lovers, like a singular dark cloud against a sun soaked sky, feels much like the pain from an open wound. It is a film that exposes us of the wonders love can open us up to, but also the damage it can cause. Yet the final message is profound, Bergman urges us not to make the same mistake he and his characters did, he reminds us the pain is a necessary and worthy risk to take.

4. Paris, Texas - 1984, Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders reminds us that love is not a closed linked between two people, but an open circle that spreads itself across families, and that goes for the negatives too. A worn, tragic call to love and sacrifice for the good of a child and his mother is at the heart of this sultry road movie. Harry Dean Stanton gives one of the most weathered and romantic performances of all time as a man who now recognizes everything that went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. This is an intimate tale of the damage a fractured love can cause spread across a grand Western odyssey, and for that reason it makes this list; it encapsulates the momentum and bravery of someone taking the first steps forward to change.

5. In The Mood for Love - 2000, Kar Wai Wong

This beautiful, vintage romance is a film made of candle lit delicacy. Love unsoiled by love. Two neighbours, who bond over their partners infidelity gradually develop a captured passion for each other. Every shot, movement and hair is composed to such a measured perfection. In the Mood for Love reignites the intensity of chaste, toying with us, excites us and eventually burns through us. In a sexually loose world (both societal and cinematically) it is both refreshing and disarming to remind us that the build up to a kiss, to a touch can be just as sensual as the touch itself. When it's over, we have to turn to any hole we can find, whisper our emotions and then cover it up.

6. Blue Valentine - 2010, Derek Cianfrance 

Although heart-throb Ryan Gosling has already starred in one of the most popular, and undoubtedly over-watched romance films of all time. One that I suspect a thousand and more unwilling partners will be subjected to by their significant other on February 14th. But if you're tired of The Notebooks rather manipulative and overblown melodrama, then I recommend Derek Cianfrance's unflinching look at the disintegration of a marriage. Doesn't sound too romantic? Well whilst it is true the films dual structure flicking between past and present does come down on the bleak side, the relationship between Gosling's free spirit and Williams committed medical student will undoubtedly strike a chord with anyone who's been in love. Yet it preaches something much more important to everyone, the antidote to many a cinematic false promise; in a relationship there is no easy fix, love doesn't conquer all, it needs support, understanding and communication.

So there you have a small handful of films that will give you a look at every side of love, they aren't something to measure yourselves by, instead let them guide you to one of the most universal and human experiences of all.

To Cinema, With love. 

 

Or should that be...

 

To Love, from Cinema? 

[Review] Sightseers - The Caravan Condition

Sightseers (2012)

Director - Ben Wheatley

Country - United Kingdom

Starring - Alice Lowe, Steve Oram

Running time - 88 minutes

Synopsis - Chris wants to show girlfriend Tina his world, but events soon conspire against the couple and their dream caravan holiday takes a very wrong turn.

Britain as a society is one built upon its traditions, and perhaps none is more ludicrous (or cherished) than that of the sacred caravan tour from campsite to campsite, complete with an abundance of vexatious locals and washed out skies. Led, marketed and even defended by a safe middle class sense of freedom that allows one to enjoy the hospitality of the great outdoors filtered through rusty showers, pull-out beds and deck chairs. Not to mention the immense strain on our mental well-being that comes with being confined to sailor-esque quarters with our nearest and dearest. For Ben Wheatley the caravan tradition masks something much more disturbing lurking beneath the surface of our mud-stained paradise. 

There is a direct primal quality to Wheatley's films, one scarcely engaged or even referenced in Britain or indeed British cinema since the 1970s. However he engages with it head on, tapping into our most visceral urges through aggressive slow-motion close-ups dominated by his male leads. More sinister however are the various cults and rituals that take place up and down the country, in last years Kill List it was the ultimate expression of middle class denial, here it infests our characters psyches and brings them into a hypnotic, violent trance. Murder is perhaps the most natural and basest means of expression.

Drawing on a legacy of lovers-on-the-run films, Sightseers' takes notes from Natural Born Killers, Mike Leigh's Nuts in May and one very obvious visual nod to Terrence Malick's debut Badlands. The message here may not be remotely original, but through the jet black realism humor, audaciously straight soundtrack and increasing absurdity of Chris and Tina's blood-stained 'erotic odyssey' the film amounts to more than the sum of it's influences. 

 

Too easily could this descend into a crass exploitation of our customary ideals at the expense of some cherished British quirks. However, neither writers Lowe or Oram, nor Wheatley are looking to mock. Instead, they find a great deal of admiration and beauty within their locales as Chris and Tina stare slack-jawed at the world’s largest pencil in the Keswick Pencil Museum or dance in the reflected light of the Blue John Caverns in Derbyshire. However there is an intense haze that blankets the landscape, inhabiting the Lake District in an alien yellow or unsettling mist, it spills into the attractions. The retired trains of Crich Tramway Museum become industrial skeletons, slapped with the label of 'heritage' as if to install a sense of entitlement and responsibility into those who come to stare. Something which Chris adopts instantaneously, or so it appears in his satisfied smile as he backs over an indignant litter bug with his caravan. This is when things change.

It is not Chris' vigilant desire to protect British tourist attractions that drives him to, as Tina puts it 'murder innocent people,' but a deeply seated social resentment. After all when he is confronted by an angry member of the National Trust after dog Poppy fouls an ancient site of interest, Chris brutally murders him, justifying it with 'He's not a person, he's a Daily Mail reader.' As the body count racks up, Tina slowly emerges as the more dominate of the two, much to Chris' discontent. Murder may be the most natural means of expression, but it is his means, and having his girlfriend take matters into her own hands usurps his control. The aforementioned jet black humor has taken the stage here, but it comes with an unnerving sense of guilt and discomfort that comes from each gloriously gooey murder. Unfortunately this wears the film down, and it runs out steam shortly before redeeming itself with an astonishing finale.        

Perhaps it isn't the fault of Chris and Tina for the disastrous outcome of their holiday, but a result social and economic climate of which they are a product, an unsettled, tainted generation who find themselves constrained by an obligation to fix the world. Led by Wheatley’s assured direction and two career-making performances, their tragedy becomes giddy pop-enjoyment, twisted thrills and a surprisingly sombre romantic charm. Eventually, as with most Holidays, Sightseers’ overcomes its issues through the tinted eyes of post-viewing reflection. You might not be after an 'erotic odyssey' of your own anytime soon, but the British countryside has never housed a more mysterious and lurid beauty.  

4/5

Rust and Bone - All sticks and stones

Put in charge of his young son, Ali leaves Belgium for Antibes to live with his sister and her husband as a family. Ali's bond with Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, grows deeper after Stephanie suffers a horrible accident. 

'I'm OP' replies the man blankly as he stares at the woman across the table when she questions their sexual relationship. He is Ali, she is Stephanie, 'Op' is their code word for hooking up. Both are marked by scars, physically and emotionally, but it was those scars that brought them together, now it threatens to shift them apart. Bones may break, rust may show, but wounds can heal, such is the tone for Audiard's nuanced drama about the human condition. 

Jacques Audiard has been considered by some a new-generation Dardenne for his previous films A Prophet and The Beat that My Heart Skipped. Although I see the connection, I feel it is a little misjudged. Where the brothers flatten their images, removing expression in the sytle of Bresson. Here Audiard basks his in sun-baked light and natural colours that reminisce of a more gentle Scorsese, almost to the point of indulgence. Ali's underground bare knuckle boxing fight may be suitably grimy and unflinchingly violent, but it's captured with a grace one would attribute to... Oh say... Orca whales gliding through the ocean with a elegant, unstoppable power. The connection is intentional, Ali is himself an Orca - capable of great damage but houses a capacity for gentleness. He struggles to process his emotions, but is also practical, kind and in ways remarkable, but he distances himself because of what he can do. His lover Stephanie carries the scars of one Orca, for Ali it is all-to-great of a reminder. 

Rust and Bone is, first and foremost, a performance piece. Marion Cotillard is remarkable as a woman who has been stripped of her life. In a conversation between the two she admits to enjoying being watched, going to nightclubs in order to entice the eyes of men, now she is reduced to a cripple gawked at by bathers on the beach. The film is light on emotional outbursts, save for one devastating scene where she wakes up in hospital only to discover her legs have been amputated, but it is through her movements and gestures, her posture and expressions that she sells her character's depression before gradual acceptance and reintegration into life. By contrast, Matthias Schoenaerts' Ali is a man of unapologetic physicality. He inhabits most of the frame, cutting through each shot with force and unpredictability. Yet, as he demonstrates in a scene in which he carries Stephanie into the ocean for a much needed, liberating swim, he is capable of a cumbersome gentleness. Both are worthy of the inevitable Oscar nomination they will, or at least should, receive. 

The film is carried by these fragile interactions between the two. One such example would be when Stephanie accepts Ali's offer of sex, 'to see if it still works,' she removes her tights, timidly at first before unraveling to unveil a sensuality that she so previously exuded. Through the intimate camera and the low key ambiance of the soundtrack we not simply observe but feel the subdued passions that slowly overwhelm first Stephanie then eventually Ali.  

Unfortunately Audiard's drama doesn't match his character's restraint, skating around and occasionally dipping into the realm of implausibility it creates an uneasy level of inconsistency. Early on, in a bid to feed his hungry son, Ali is shown stealing a from an electronics shop. It is only a few hours later they are picked up by his sisters husband and taken to a house and fed. A rather rash, unjustified action all things considered. The son isn't really given enough attention to warrant his existence in the first place, instead he serves as a device to illustrate Ali's emotional distance and fearsome destruction and Stephanie's relationship. The most contrived sequence comes during one of the bear knuckle fight sequences as a battered Ali looks down for the count until Stephanie shows up and inspires him to victory, not so much a moment of euphoria as a rejected scene from a Rocky sequel. To frequently does Audiard give way to melodrama this way, and ultimately the film's impact suffers. 

There is a minor potency here that is much admired, but it is wrapped in a somewhat misguided screenplay, resulting in a noble miss-fire. Audiard's direction is assured undoubtedly, but it is through the performances from Cotillard and Schoenaerts that we eventually give ourselves to the films tenderness. Like it's characters, the movie succeeds, wounded and bruised, but with bones (and rust) intact. 

3/5