A-List: Top Five Movies About Love
By J. Don Birnam
June 11, 2015
5. The Before Series (1995-2014)
Before he gained notoriety for Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s true labor of love was the umm, labor that is love series in the life-spanning Before movies. Featuring exquisite aging performances by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, the Before Series films feature honest, brutal, and moving portrayals of the beauty, randomness, and difficulty of constructing a life with another person in a world filled with anxiety, loneliness, and self-doubt.
Rightly hailed as realistic and accurate, the Before Series touches upon love in its different stages, growing as humans grow - from young and hopeful while naive, to erratic and risk-taking, to slower and more thoughtful. The brilliance of the trilogy is that the message can be seen across time: love for another person is molded by the circumstances of one’s life and takes on many different forms. If you’ve ever experienced a lifetime of love for the same person and observed it transform, there is no doubt that the Before Series speaks directly to you.
In the end, however, for the Before Series, love is timeless and it takes work.
4. Weekend (2011)
Weekend is, to me, is one of the most moving love stories of all time, despite the fact that Brokeback was the obvious candidate for the gay entry on the list. To say that this small budget, independent little piece is better than some of the giants I have listed before now is worthy of the fourth spot on this list is to say a mouthful. But, if we are thinking unconventionally, Weekend deserves the spot.
This movie’s approach to the subject is even more realistic, if that is possible, than Richard Linklater’s. If you’ve ever experienced the intense, burning passion of a time-bound affair, you will know what I’m talking about. In this movie the protagonists do not spend an entire lifetime bound to each other, but instead meet randomly on a Friday night at a nightclub, have what purports to be a one night stand, and end up spending what seems like a lifetime, but is only the weekend, together.
The story, then, is universal. And the feeling of helplessness, of fear, of sadness, but, ultimately, of resignation, that overwhelms the end of a torrid, passionate, yet pointless affair, is conveyed honestly and mournfully. In the end, the denouement is neither tragic nor uplifting for the lovers. He who leaves, leaves with a sigh. He who stays, stays with a tear. But such is life.
For Weekend, it seems, love is fleeting.
3. Jules Et Jim (1962)
The best movie ever made by the French master Francois Truffaut surely deserves the number three spot today. One woman, Catherine, ensnares the two title characters, previously best friends, in her deceitful and alluring web of seduction and selfishness. But that, according to the French existentialist, is love.
Again, personal experiences with this particular type of love may make the story resonate more to some viewers than others. But who could not appreciate the careful cinematography, the melancholic soundtrack, and the screwball tragedy of the protagonists as they go from lovers amongst themselves to bitter enemies? Why, the movie asks, must love destroy so much in its path, even the closest of perfect friendships?
The answer is not really given, except that one character escapes the seemingly inevitable doom that should befall all three, while the other two skate off into the infinite abyss together. If you haven’t seen the movie, I hope you think the combinations of which two of the three essentially die together are endless, because they are. Of course the survivor is also doomed forever, chained to tragedy by the haunting memory of the broken heart, a memory that singes like the burn of the eerie tune that captivates the narrative center of the movie.
For Jules Et Jim, arguably, love is hopeless tragedy, and betrayal.
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