A Pause to Watch: Unconventional Love Stories
Amid the whirl of our society’s evolved ideas about love, some of which wave a dismissive hand against its significance, there remains a lingering sense of what love should be and what it’s supposed to look like in the life of lovers. Sometimes this sense is held fast like a doctrine. At other times it is not even grasped at, but unexpectedly floats by, barely perceptive to the senses. Three films I’ve seen somewhat recently take hold of an old-fashioned sense of love while weaving love stories set firmly in our contemporary uncertainty about love’s meaning and its place in the humdrum and hustle and bustle of life.
500 Days of Summer begins with the disclaimer: “Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental … Especially you, Jenny Beckman … Bitch.” We know where the rocky romance of Tom and Summer is going, even if they, or at least Tom, doesn’t. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom Hansen, a trained architect who writes greeting cards and falls in love with his boss’s new assistant, Summer Finn, played by Zooey Deschanel. She likes him too, but only for the moment. She’s not waiting around for someone better; she simply doesn’t believe in a love that lasts a lifetime. In her experience, life happens and love ceases. Tom does believe in an everlasting love, and he badly wants to share that kind of love with Summer. “It’s love, it’s not Santa Claus,” he tells her. For Tom, belief in love is reasonable and something he should be able to expect from Summer, even if she states otherwise from the start and never hides her faithlessness in the ideal for which Tom hopes. The romantic comedy’s central tension develops from the intertwining of Tom’s hope for love affecting Summer’s faith in love and her lack of faith altering the course of his hope.
George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, is not unlike Summer. He too has no belief in love or any other kind of rootedness. He’s at home in the air, detached from commitments, possessions, anything that might tie him down. He seems perfectly content with the fleeting and forgettable conversations he has with strangers in airports and airplanes. Fellow frequent traveler Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) provides him with uncommitted but planned and playful sex. That’s as attached as he gets or wants to get, until a job-related threat to his comfortable routine, and then the realization that he matters no more than a parenthesis to someone, make him realize that he doesn’t have life, love, and happiness all figured out.
“So, I can hurt now, or hurt later,” muses Claire Dane’s Mirabelle in Steve Martin’s Shopgirl. The story follows Mirabelle in her relationships with two men, the dashing and sophisticated Ray (Steve Martin), who unsuspectingly buys her expensive gloves from her own “shop,” and the awkward and uncouth Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), who has to borrow two dollars from her so they can split the cost of a movie. Neither one of these relationships quite capture Mirabelle’s idea of romance – at least at first – but one of them may bring her some happiness. She has to make a choice, however. The plot doesn’t provide her an easy decision.
Comments are closed.