[Row Three programming if we owned a Rep Cinema]

Breaking Up is Hard To Do Triple Bill

Blue Valentine 5:30pm

Nights and Weekends 7pm

5×2 9pm

The gold standard of the divorce drama is Ingmar Bergman’s miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, so in substitute for six hours of the same harrowing relationship, this triple bill will do its best to live up to this standard providing some relief with the change in situation each film affords. Breaking up is hard to do. Hollywood has a tendency of trivializing the act of break-up, usually as a plot point reconciled happily by the time the credits roll. The following three films abide by a different logic. Sometimes love ends badly. Sometimes the first blush of affection gives way to cold disinterest, misplaced priorities, miscommunication and tired familiarity. It need not be anything as audacious as Tiger Woods driving a car into a tree after an adulterous hidden life; that too trivializes and makes anecdotal what ought to be frighteningly intimate. The break-up genre works best when it triggers questions of your own relationship, when it feels plausible and challenges your commitment, your happiness. If you are not in a relationship presently but wounded or reminiscent of one past, the following films may provide some solace by their believable familiarity and power in numbers. Your hurt is elsewhere felt; such is one of the great capacities of cinema, and of art in general.

In Blue Valentine, a marriage slowly implodes before our eyes. Of the three, this film best plays off of Bergman’s story, denying us a particular issue or abuse to hang our understanding on. The fault of Cindy and Dean is nothing more than emotionally illiteracy, try as they might to understand one another or even carry on a civil conversation, the lack of a common grammar keeps them perpetually on edge. Complicating the matter is their mutual love for their daughter who goes through the majority of the film oblivious to the underlying fissures of their family unit. The film intercuts moments of the first blush of love with scenes of the last gasp and inevitable destruction of their union, the two timelines building towards the harshest of contrasts by the final scene. Out of this collage of moments a sense of who these people are emerge, the realization is slow in coming as pertinent information about their relationship is teased out, just when you think you understand a character motivation or takes sides on an issue, a new development in the story challenges your assumptions. The effect is intoxicating. When Cindy attempts to casually tell Dean of an encounter of a old flame in the liquor store, it’s like the air in the car is slowly escaping, and having not been privy to the history underlying their conversation what you are left with is visceral drama, is he going to lash out? Is she going to burst into tears? The scene teeters on the edge as does the bulk of the denouement. When the fireworks come, literally and figuratively, you know it has been a long time coming.

In Joe Swanberg’s mumblecore film, Nights and Weekends, drama is more subdued but no less honest. Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg star as Mattie and James, an amorous couple that must confront the challenges of a long distance relationship. Like Blue Valentine, Nights and Weekends is not afraid to show sex explicitly and use the body language as a means of getting to the emotional distance of the characters. In the case of Mattie and James, a relationship fueled strongly by libido, the question arises whether they can cope on affection alone over the long weeks they spend apart. Beginning and ending with fairly explicit sex scenes, the intimacy or lack thereof between the two tell us volumes of where this relationship is heading. Highly observational and candid, Nights and Weekends is a bounty of body language and character tics that ring so damn true to me, though slight in story it pays off in the fine details. Ultimately, there is a forlorn nostalgia to the film that some may identify with (“the one that got away”). Of the three stories, this is the one where I most felt like the relationship was a missed opportunity and is all the more tragic because of it.

Which leads to the most original of constructs of the three films, Francois Ozon’s 5×2. As the title implies, there are only five scenes in the film and they consist of the union dissolution of two characters, Marion and Gilles. The conceit? Their story is told in reverse. We begin with the finalizing of the divorce of the couple, two hardened husks of the people they once were, and work in scenes backwards to the moment of their first encounter. I adore Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (the French Gillian Anderson) and in this film she magically de-ages as Marion, a woman who is largely portrayed as the victim in the story but along the way challenges that label. In one of the signature scenes she dances provocatively with a younger man at a get-together to a stellar Paolo Conte song. The formal conceit of the film echoes in a way what is done in Blue Valentine, juxtaposing the good times with the bad, but as the crowning film of this triple bill, 5×2 ends on the promise of happiness, even if in this particular case, we know where it’s going to lead. As Marion and Gilles walk towards the sunset, the immensity of what we have watched overcome any sense of romanticism. If any of us knew in advance of the pain to come, would we change our course in that moment?

[Knowing that Blue Valentine is not available outside the festival circuit, and in the interest of motivating people to partake of a triple bill on this subject, a satisfying substitute would be Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together. The perfect symmetry is somewhat lost between the first and last film but Happy Together looks at co-dependent relationships in a way that is not explored elsewhere in this bill.]