Love, literature and cinema

A (very) personal view of love through literature and cinema 

Literature  and cinema show us the different aspects of love that we can find in  life – from the lowest passions to the most idealistic. I'd like to offer in a few lines my personal view of the theme. Different kinds of love and many ways to love and be loved. I'll start with the Japanese movie In the Realm of the Senses, which talks about the passionate, destructive love that leads the main characters to their deaths. In this film, it's obvious that the absolutism of desire brings about the elimination of the individual. An analogous way of getting swept up in passion till death can be witnessed in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.

Shakespeare's drama Othello is about love and jealousy. In this case, what brings the protagonist to total loss is a lack of self-esteem; he doesn't believe Desdemona could actually love him. There is an amazing film version of this play interpreted by Julia Ormond and Laurence Fishbourne and directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Another paradigm of obsessive love is a Patricia Highsmith novel brought to the big screen twice, first as A plein soleil with Alain Delon and later as the famous The Talented Mr Ripley. The story concerns a kind of love/friendship that becomes a disproportionate adoration, a very dangerous obsession that ends badly.

 At the same time, we can find the narcissistic deformation of an unhealthily inflated self-image. Here we have the myth of Don Juan (from Mozart's Don Giovanni to Zorrilla's, to the modern one incarnate in James Bond). Another great example is The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book that explains this pathology perfectly.

The next step in this reflection is lolita-esque love, the sexual attraction to adolescence and youth that triggers the remembrance of earlier times. Along with Nabakov’s novel Lolita, there are many films dealing with this theme. Beautiful Girls, American Beauty and L'ultimo bacio are a few.

Related to this is the love of youth as a personification of beauty and innocence; the Thomas Mann novel Death in Venice (brought to the screen by Lucchino Visconti) captures this brilliantly.

Some outstanding examples relating to impossible or unrealistic love, in my humble opinion, are Chekhov's story The Lady with the Dog, The English Patient and, last but not least, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. All are dramas that explain in a beautiful and delicate way how love can become impossible and painful.

Nor should we pass over gratuitous and generous love; that’s what occurs in Milosz’s Miguel de Mañara. A case of love without bounds. Another awesome film where love and political commitment go together is Doctor Zhivago.

As far as I’m concerned, love and sacrifice walk hand in hand in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and in the film Casablanca, without any doubt one of my favorites.

I'd like to finish this article by mentioning the great film The Eternal Sunshine, which examines love and memory. The main character embarks on a program to forget and try to live a new life, but in the end falls in love all over again.

And how could I forget to mention love and death? Shadowlands has this reflection to make: Do you believe in love after death? That could be another topic, don’t you think?

 
Silly Sally