02 · 12 · 16

Four Alternative Visions of Love for Valentines Day

Chloe Roddick, programadora

Last year, the film adaptation of British author E.L. James’ novel 50 Shades of Grey had its commercial release on Valentine’s day, a bold move, according to New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, who suggested that the film is “not just unromantic, but specifically anti-romantic”, citing its active rejection of sentiment and emotion. But is that necessarily anti-romantic? Does love have to be sentimental? Does it have to be loving? What’s ‘normal’ in love anyway?

With Valentines Day just around the corner, we take a look at four unusual onscreen visions of love that aren’t afraid to push boundaries:

Él (1953) by Luis Buñuel:
Wealthy, religious bourgeois bachelor Francisco (Arturo de Córdova) spies Gloria (Delia Garcés), a beautiful young girl, in church one day and becomes determined to seduce her. He eventually persuades her to leave her fiancée and marry him, only to reveal an intense, obsessive jealous streak on their honeymoon. His behavior soon becomes abusive and controlling – he beats her, follows her and locks her up, convinced that she is fooling around with other men at every given opportunity. The film culminates in a deeply disturbing scene in which Francisco creeps into Gloria’s room while she sleeps, clutching a bottle of anesthetic and a needle and thread, desperate to obliterate his wife’s sexuality in a final, violent act of possession. In Buñuel’s vision, love is a dark and frightening force, one that drives people (particularly men) to commit acts of unthinkable cruelty in their desperation to control and own the object of their desire.

Max mon amour (1986) by Nagisa Oshima:
Ten years after making his controversial, erotic masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses (1976) - the true story of a woman so consumed by love and desire that she murders her lover and carries a significant part of his anatomy around in her handbag (“I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself”) - Oshima made an even stranger love story. Max, Mon Amour, co-written with Buñuel’s scriptwriter and collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, is the story of Peter (Anthony Higgins), a diplomat who, suspecting his wife (Charlotte Rampling) of infidelity, comes home early one day only to find her in bed with a chimpanzee. Desperate not to upset the stability of their family life, Peter allows ‘Max’ to become a part of the family, but the chimp’s unruly bestiality threatens to slice through the fragile gentility of his bourgeois fantasy. Aside from being a biting (and very Bunuelian) commentary about the charade of bourgeois convention and morality, Oshima’s film is also a love story - Rampling’s character truly loves and desires the ape and her feelings are reciprocated, albeit with an ape’s indelicacy.

Secretary (2002) by Steven Shainberg:
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a sensitive and socially awkward young woman who, despite her lack of experience and inability to type, is hired as a secretary by eccentric attorney E. Edward Grey (James Spader). He is intrigued by her submissiveness, and the two embark on an S&M relationship that ends up with Lee in her wedding dress (she was going to marry her dull but stable boyfriend Peter) sitting in an office chair without moving, as commanded by Grey, for a full three days to prove her devotion. It is a powerful climatic scene - Lee’s family and friends visit her and attempt to convince her to give up her submissive display, citing feminism and religion, and suggesting that “there are other ways to show your feelings...more conventional ways”. But for Lee there is no other way – her love is necessarily passive, part of an accepted sadomasochistic dichotomy that is ultimately, as the film’s ‘happy’ ending suggests, right for both characters. As Lee’s own father puts it: “who’s to say that love needs to be soft and gentle?”

Harold & Maude (1971) by Hal Ashby:
Harold (Bud Cort) is a young man with an unhealthy obsession with death who forms a close friendship, then a love relationship, with Maude (Ruth Gordon), a 79-year-old woman he meets at a funeral. They enjoy a short-lived but happy romance until Maude takes her own life on her 80th birthday, believing that this is the proper age to die. It is a jubilant, uncompromising, upbeat film about a love that smashes through normative or socially-imposed ideas about age and propriety. Harold wants to marry the woman he loves, but is ultimately forced to accept both her death and her dying wish that he “go and love some more” - to take his special kind of abnormal love out into the world. The film ends with him cheerily strumming a Cat Stevens song on his banjo and dancing off into the distance.