San Valentino
Valentine's Day Falling On a Friday Means It's Time to Stir Up a Chocolate Negroni, Order In a Heart-Shaped Pizza, Hit "Play" on Our After-Hours Playlist, and Get Ready for the Long Holiday Weekend
There’s No Time Like the…
Last Saturday night I streamed the movie We Live In Time on the Home Box Office. Released last fall from A24, it’s a time-jumping love story told in fragmented, out-of-chronological-order scenes, hopping back and forth to specific moments and events over the course of a relationship (the movie’s tag-line is “There’s no time like the past present future.”) The British romantic drama, filmed in Herne Hill in southeast London, stars Academy Award Nominees Florence Pugh as Almut (a pragmatic, talented chef on the rise) and Andrew Garfield as Tobias (an affable romantic who works in IT for the Weetabix cereal company). Their unlikely relationship takes them from a memorable meet-cute to becoming parents to tackling much darker, heartbreaking concerns. It was quite charming though bittersweet and melancholy (my primary self-descriptors).
After the credits rolled I started thinking about romantic movies I’ve liked over the years. Not necessarily the “Most Romantic Movies” standards like The Notebook, Titanic, Ghost, and When Harry Met Sally, and Moonstruck, but ones I had a more personal connection with. Movies like Valley Girl (1983), Splash (1984), Pretty In Pink (1986), Dirty Dancing (1987), Broadcast News (1987), Say Anything (1989), Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Singles (1992), Reality Bites (1994), “The Before Trilogy” (Before Sunrise, 1995; Before Sunset, 2004; Before Midnight, 2013) Jerry Maguire (1996), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Notting Hill (1999), Lost In Translation (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Call Me By Your Name (2017).
I spotlighted two of these examples in last summer’s “Roll Credits!” dispatch, focusing on their memorable final scenes.
In Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan after the last scene the primary characters part ways after picking up unemployment forms after all being laid off or fired, Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Josh (Matt Keeslar), the former assistant district attorney who she’s been seeing, enter the subway on the way to lunch at Lutèce. They silently flirt as the O’Jays’ “Love Train” plays and the pair begin dancing then walk away.
There’s a brief fade and then it comes back up with the song still playing but Alice and Josh are gone but there’s a breaking of the fourth wall as the credits roll and all of the train car’s passengers are now dancing, soon rejoined by Alice and Josh as the subway continues. Even the passengers on the platform are dancing as the train moves on and disappears into a dark tunnel leaving their future unknown.
The ending of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation never fails to move me. While staying at The Park Hyatt Tokyo, a flirtatious friendship develops between middle-aged fading American actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray), whose being paid two million dollars to shoot a series of whiskey commercials, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent college graduate accompanying her photographer husband on a photo shoot.
There’s a relatively chaste kiss goodnight in the elevator on their last night together followed by a bittersweet goodbye in the hotel lobby the next morning. As Bob is in the back of his car being driven to the airport, he asks the driver to stop when he sees Charlotte walking down a crowded Tokyo street. She’s happy to see him. They embrace and he famously whispers a private message into her ear and briefly kiss and say goodbye and each smile as Charlotte wipes away a tear. Charlotte disappears into the crowd as Bob drives off to the airport. “Just Like Honey” by The Jesus and Mary Chain Gang kicks set against a collage of the passing lights, buildings, and roadways before fading to black, ambiguously leaving viewers to wonder if their chapter is over or just beginning.
But when the romance leads to something a bit more on the sexy side (and no, I’m not talking 9 1/2 Weeks or 50 Shades of Gray), nothing beats 1998’s Out of Sight (directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Scott Frank, adapted from the 1996 Elmore Leonard novel), which I saw opening weekend at the Regal Cinemas Carousel Mall Stadium 17 in Syracuse.
Just look at the caliber of the cast: George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Dennis Farina, Albert Brooks, Steve Zahn, Catherine Keener, Luis Guzmán, Isaiah Washington, Viola Davis, Michael Keaton, and Samuel L. Jackson. (The cameo of Michael Keaton reprising his role as FBI Agent Ray Nicolette from Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown also established a film geek connection between the Soderbergh/Tarantino multiverse.)