Done in 60 seconds: Blue Valentine

It sure as f*ck hurts

Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
trailer 


I'm gonna be honest. Blue Valentine is my film of 2011 so far. And it's gonna take some beating. I enjoy a dose of perplexity, and this film forced me to ask myself; what actually makes a great film? 

  

It depicts the torturous breakdown of a young couple's marriage to absolute nothingness. We see Cindy (Williams) and Dean (Gosling) fall both in and out of love, as the film oscillates between present day mundanity and flashbacks of hedonistic courtship. Flashbacks show quirky serenades, most notably a scene where Dean sings the somewhat prophetic 'You Only Hurt the Ones You Love' to a tap-dancing Cindy (the signature trailer scene). Nowadays, the couple exchange few words and glance blankly at one another. We go from HOT, HOT, sex (which made me grateful I wasn't watching with the parentals), to drunk-filled hate romps against a saturated backdrop of a sleazy motel room. I'm all about narrative normally, but it's the tense atmosphere - lack of dialogue and grainy cinematics - that make this story so glorious. 

And the performances; excruciatingly brilliant. A wounded and hopeless Gosling (boasting that same fragility of Noah in The Notebook) is mirrored by a reticent and cold Williams. The tension between the couple is at times almost unbearable. Once-upon-a-time Dean filled Cindy with lust, now his very touch makes her skin crawl.  I was tortured by Dean's desperation, suffocated by the invasive cinematography (Andrij Parekh) and harrowed by Cindy's emptiness. It's a tough one that shatters and smashes 'love story' conventions. It's no Notebook girlies. Put simply,  it's no fairytale. 

Ok, so it's not fun. It rarely makes you smile, and when it does it's smiles of sadness for the story it could have been. So what the hell makes it so great? 

Firstly, it presents the most sincere portrayal of the fatality of love to come out of a revived fashionable narrative - unrequited love (Revolutionary Road, 500 Days of Summer). It's relentless and raw. Shot in a grimy docu-style that makes you feel like a voyeur watching two lost souls torture one another. It's emotive. The performances are so intricate and wounding they alone make it a must-see. Finally, it has a simple, but intelligent, dualism. Because the truth is that sometimes we're madly in love and the next moment we're not. How'd that happen we ask? 

A film has to make me feel to be great. Who knows why we fall out of love! This film doesn't tell us why. But what it shows, is that it happens. And that it sure as f*ck hurts. 

Bitter without the sweet, filmdocta prescribes 5 stars.