This is my Valentine's post for you all. Nothing pink, or sweet, or heart-shaped, or chocolatey, or surrealistic.
Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines) is a story about love, rather than a love story. But love in its purest form, not metamorphosed into a consumerist, american-dream, sugar-coated, together-forever lies we hear every day. Love with all its facets and described not as an everlasting feeling but a combination of opposing sentiments, which shifts and transforms day to day, through the years.
The aesthetics are exquisite, with great care to the visual imagery and the costumes, considering the time-span the movie takes place in. Costume designer was Erin Benach (Drive, The Place Beyond the Pines), responsible again for making us fall in love with Ryan Gosling's leather jackets...
BLUE VALENTINE
(director: Derek Cianfrance; 2010)
A delicate,
complicated telling of a harsh and simple story. Boy meets girl; boy falls in
love, marries girl; boy and girl fall out of love, and wish it were not so.
This is hardly fresh material, but Derek Cianfrance, the director and
co-writer, has fashioned it into something of startling directness and
intensity. Throughout the film, he flips back and forth between the enlivening
past, where the couple first met, and the ashen deadness of the present, where
they are peeling apart; you can’t always tell which period is which, and that
only makes things worse. The leading actors, Ryan Gosling and Michelle
Williams, barely put a foot wrong, although the story is crammed with wrongness
and awkwardness of every kind—the pair of them trying and failing to rekindle
old desires, for instance, on the floor of a cheap motel, or the unforgettable
sequence in which she dances, badly, to his tortured singing on a cold night.
No grander, more foolish declaration of love has been seen, or heard, in recent
cinema. There are fireworks at the end, but by then the hopes are fizzling
away. With the remarkable Faith Wladyka as the lovers’ five-year-old daughter.
I don't
know, I just feel like I should just stop thinking about it, you know, but I
can't. Maybe I've seen too many movies, you know, love at first sight. What do
you think about love at first sight? You think you can love somebody just by
looking at them? But the thing is man, I felt like I knew her, you ever get
that feeling? Yeah, I probably don't right... it felt like I did though.
[... ]
XOXO
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