Alternative Valentine's Day Movies

,

So Valentine’s Day. Named after a religious icon of the early Roman church, who probably never existed, the event we know today replaced the date of the pre-existing Rites of the Lupercalia festival. The abridged version: this was a celebration of werewolves that licenced the pre-Christian citizens of Rome to get up to all sorts of beastly shenanigans.

Alternative Valentine's Day Movies

 A certain degree of cognitive dissonance seems to still be present today. This week the Playstation Network is advertising Alternative Valentine’s Day movie sale, pitching violent action movies at disaffected – presumably male – customers.

Here’s the thing guys. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of romance. It was a standard element of most movies until recently when the industry’s marketing geniuses decided that we need genres that drill down to specific emotions. Michael Bay movies, for example, seem to represent the emotion of agitated boredom.

So romance has been gendered as something only women are interested in, whereas anything with explosions is the province of men. I guess that makes Thor: The Dark World the perfect movie so – thanks movie marketing!

For the past few weeks I have been involved in an office-wide dispute. The cause? Richard Curtisemotionally manipulatively, tepidly directed – though sporadically well-acted (looking at you Liam Neeson) – Love, Actually. Needless to say I am not a fan. It is an ensemble piece that reduces its characters to clichés and goes so far as to set up a series of Pavlovian responses – the Joni Mitchell song for example – in place of engaging an emotional reaction through storytelling.

In the spirit of fairness here is my list of five romantic films that are actually well-made in their own right.

Last Night (1998)


Alternative Valentine's Day Movies: Last Night (1998)

 I would contrast the vapidity of Curtis’ film with Don McKellar’s Last Night, which takes the end of the world and manages to evoke a sense of just how important love can be. Last Night is also an ensemble piece, one that establishes each of its characters through how they are trying to make peace with, well, the apocalypse. We never learn the cause for the Earth’s destruction – although the continuous daylight and the ability of characters to predict to the very minute when it is about to happen suggests a supernova.

McKellar himself stars as Patrick, a bereaved widower who has decided to spend his last hours on Earth drinking wine on his rooftop. His friend Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) is counting down to the end by indulging in every sexual fantasy he’s ever had. Sandra Oh plays a wife desperately trying to make her way home to meet her husband, who turns out to be director David Cronenberg, a power company rep ringing customers to apologise for the imminent cessation of service.  His secretary, the late Tracy Wright who sadly passed away in 2010, is nursing a strong crush which he is oblivious to. These are all characters trying to make sense of their lives, to make a final connection with other humans, with only hours to spare. Last Night is both comic in its depiction of the end of the world, but also powerfully moving in its vision of the importance of being with others.

Frankie and Johnny (1991)


Alternative Valentine's Day Movies: Frankie and Johnny (1991)

No end of the world here. This is a straight up working class romance starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino. Johnny is an ex-con who takes a job at a diner, where he meets Pfeiffer’s Frankie, a put-upon waitress. The casting caused controversy at the time, as Kathy Bates had originated the role on stage in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Pfeiffer’s luminous beauty was only slightly dimmer for the role but in fairness to the actress, despite the Hollywood casting she delivers an excellent performance.

Pacino is also great in a less-mannered-than-usual role. His explanation of the impact of prison-life on his sexual performance is a laugh out loud moment (to reassure readers, it is not a rape joke). Nathan Lane also appears as a gay neighbour of Johnny’s and the film earned a GLAAD award for its, for the time, sympathetic portrayal of LGBTQ lifestyles. Garry Marshall’s film is sweetly funny and a well-observed portrayal of a relationship strained by real-world circumstances.

Romance & Cigarettes (2005)


Alternative Valentine's Day Movies: Romance & Cigarettes (2005)

 John Turturro’s romantic musical has its ups and downs – it’s certainly not a home-run – but there is still more feeling and pathos here than in most recent cookie-cutter rom-coms. It’s a film about a husband, played by James Gandolfini (yup, he sings), whose marriage is thrown into strife when his wife (Susan Sarandon) discovers his infidelity with a lingerie saleswoman (Kate Winslet). Also, Gandolfini’s curiously named philanderer Nick Murder has just learned he has cancer; so not your typical fare then.

It needs to be said that the film is worth the price of admission alone for Christopher Walken’s song and dance number to Tom Jones’ Delilah.

The story resembles a Jarvis Cocker song – full of low-key observations about desire and the fickleness of mortality – with a soundtrack of blue-collar musical favourites for the cast to belt out. Mandy Moore, Mary Louise Parker, Eddie Izzard, Bobby Cannavale and Steve Buscemi all pop up and give it their best shot. It is Gandolfini’s delivery of Englebert Humberdinck’s A Man Without Love, which then builds to the whole neighbourhood joining in, that sticks in the memory.  His character is selfish and conceited – yet you can’t help but feel for his futile grasping for one last gasp of love. Romance & Cigarettes is a truly distinctive romantic film, with a soundtrack to die for.


Bringing Up Baby (1938)


Alternative Valentine's Day Movies: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

 Screwball comedies get written off as light and insubstantial, but beneath the rapid-fire banter the best of the form have a revving engine of finely tuned plot mechanics. This Howard Hawks classic is deathless in its appeal; silly, delightful and still very, very funny. Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant were never better together and the titular Baby – a tamed leopard – actually makes you feel slightly nervous for the manic actress. The pair had previously performed together – with Grant using something closer to his original English accent – in the cross-dressing comedy Sylvia Scarlet and would reunite again for The Philadelphia Story two years later. Here their chemistry is fantastic, which leads to some great, off-the wall banter between the two.

Grant’s sheltered palaeontologist David Huxley is set to make his name with the presentation of a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton, though romantically frustrated by his devoted fiancée Alice Swallow (an amusingly officious Virginia Walker) who insists on waiting until their wedding day before consummating their relationship. The day before he meets the spoiled heiress Susan Vance (Hepburn), who confuses him for a zoologist and blackmails him into helping her tame her pet tiger, Baby. It quickly becomes clear that Susan is inventing reasons to keep David around – she also happens to have substantial leverage as her aunt is a prospective financial donor for his work – going so far as to deliberately get the two of them arrested. Driven to distraction, the film famously has a scene with Grant in a dressing gown jumping up and down and shouting that he feels ‘gay all of a sudden’, David unwittingly becomes increasingly fond of this maddening woman. This is not only a sweetly comical romance, but a great all-round film.


A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) (1946)


Alternative Valentine's Day Movies: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) (1946)

A classic British film from the unstoppable Powell and Pressburger (although the scandal surrounding 1960 film Peeping Tom would put paid to the former’s career), A Matter Of Life and Death (also known as Stairway to Heaven) has the effortless charming David Niven as a WWII pilot who falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter) moments before his plane crashes. Instead of dying, he finds himself on a beach on the English coast and wouldn’t you know it, June the woman he – rather literally – fell for happens along to meet him. 

It is only afterwards that Niven’s pilot Peter is contacted by The Other World, which explains the metaphysical bureaucratical error. He should have died flying his plane, but somehow in the fog his psychopomp missed him. Peter is given the option of arguing his case – why should he be allowed to continue to live – before a court of his Heavenly peers.

There is poignancy to the wartime setting, beautifully balanced with the whimsical romanticism of Peter and June fighting against the odds to remain together. The stairway to Heaven sequence remains impressive, with the following court-room comedy still very laugh-out-loud worthy. The film is also interesting for its romanticising of the so-called Special Relationship – turns out members of the afterlife at Peter’s trial still hold grudges from the War of Independence – and the light secularisation of the heavenly space, which is never actually referred to as Heaven. An unlikely tribute to the directing pair behind the film would later appear in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.
- Emmet O'Cuana

0 comments:

Post a Comment