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Casablanca Michael Curtiz, 1941 As Noel says in his review of "Cyrano" above, all great romantic movies are to some extent about loss. Whether its our cynicism about love working out or our self-pity encouraging us to believe that fate is always against us, love stories which end up with the lovers eternally parted are always more appealing than those with happy endings. "Casablanca" is Hollywood"s finest love story because its as much about the things which keep us apart as the things which bind us together - honour, chance, and the love which is so great that it extends to letting go of the person because that"s what is best for them. Humphrey Bogart"s cynical, uncommitted cafe owner Rick has pretended for so long that he doesn"t care about anyone or anything that he almost believes it to be true but the arrival in Casablanca of Ilse - Ingrid Bergman at her most radiant - reaffirms his faith in the world because it shows to him that there is something he cares about after all. When Rick sends Ilse off with Victor Laszlo at the end of "Casablanca", it"s because it"s not only the right thing to do but because it"s the only thing to do. What redeems this, one of the greatest moments in Hollywood cinema, from being crushingly sad is that Rick remembers that the love one feels doesn"t go away simply because the loved one is no longer there but it lives on, the memory of the past forever lighting up the darkness of the present. As he says to her, "We"ll always have Paris". Then, just to tease, us, the film ends with a joyous affirmation of the love we can feel through platonic comradeship as Rick says to Claude Raines" corrupt police captain, "You know Louis, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship". "Casablanca" is one of the most quotable of all films - even if most people get the quotes wrong - and its so full of the magic that the Golden Age of Hollywood could pour into every project it cared about that there"s some justification to Umberto Eco"s assertion that "Casablanca isn"t just a movie. Casablanca is the movies". Brilliantly directed, written with just enough wit to cover some of the stickier bits of preachifying, it"s the perfect Hollywood movie and Bogart, in his prime, is coolness personified. This wonderful love story - achingly romantic without being sentimental - is now available on a fine Special Edition in R1 and R2 with two commentaries, several documentaries and a variety of other treasures. Every movie fan should own a copy. Give it to someone you love or, if the one you love has got on that plane and out of your life, give it to yourself. I can guarantee that you"ll soon feel better. Chasing Amy Kevin Smith, 1997 "All every woman really wants, be it mother, senator, nun...is some serious deep-dickin"." -- Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) I"ll share a revelation with you folks - I hate romantic movies. Despise them, in fact. Most of them follow the same boring formula, that would seem stale on a daily soap opera. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy makes up with girl; boy and girl ride off into the sunset (often with Whitney Houston on the soundtrack.) Not to mention, that most of them are unashamedly sentimental, and I loathe anything remotely sappy. Yep, most rom-coms like to forget a little thing called "reality", choosing to show sugar-coated relationships with a happy conclusion. Well, not Kevin Smith"s classic Chasing Amy, a rom-com that scores points for being brutally honest, crude, and genuinely heartbreaking. It"s a reminder that Ben Affleck can indeed act when given decent material, and his performance as love-struck comic book artist Holden remains his best yet. A doomed romance from the start, his relationship with lesbian colleague Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) is full of twists and turns, with several scenes that hit below the belt (I actually recognised moments from my own life here), and others that are screamingly funny. Smith"s electric script manages to mix toilet humour and serious themes seamlessly, with his usual quota of memorable dialogue (delivered with breathless panache by Jason Lee.) Full of inner-meaning, and dripping in subtext, Chasing Amy is a remarkably human drama; representing the high point in View Askew"s short, but productive history. A modern gem. The film has been treated well on DVD. Originally released in the US by Criterion, Miramax bought the rights, and released the very same disc over here. As usual for Smith, it"s a cracking edition. The transfer handles the low-budget elements incredibly well (supervised by DP David Klein), but it"s the bonus material that begs most of the attention. The commentary by Smith, Affleck, and assorted members of the View Askew posse is fantastic. Hilarious, full of insight, and highly enjoyable, it"s an example to commentators everywhere. Throw in a few deleted scenes with introductions by Smith, some amusing outtakes, and a guide to the View Askewniverse, and you have a first-rate disc. Snoogans! Before Sunrise/Before Sunset Richard Linklater, 1995/2004 Richard Linklater has made films for major studios in his time, most successfully with The School of Rock. But he began as an independent and he remains true to his roots, making small-scale and occasionally experimental films in between his more remunerative assignments. Like Eric Rohmer (a clear influence on the two Before) films) he loves nothing better than to let us watch his characters talk, filming them as unobtrusively as possible. From his earliest films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused he’s often been more interested in character rather than tight plotting. In the absence of much “happening” on the surface, his films work as a series of moments – happy moments, sad ones, romantic ones, some with a beauty it’s not easy to put into words. Sometimes these moments don’t even involve any dialogue: look at the scene in Before Sunrise where Jesse and Celine play a record in a listening booth, a scene that’s entirely conveyed by the two actors’ facial expressions and body language. So we follow Jesse and Celine around Vienna as they talk about each other’s lives, what they believe in. This is a romantic film, to be sure, but the romance is made much more poignant because we know that Celine and Jesse will have to part in the morning. Before Sunrise is a film about making the most of a short time, about two people realising that they are in the middle of one of the best days and nights of their lives and trying to get it right without messing up. This is a film that is somewhat out of its time by being unashamedly about the process of falling in love, and only incidentally about the act of making love. Not many films make me want to be twenty-five again, but this is one of them. At the end of Before Sunrise, Jesse sees Celine off on her train as they vow to meet again in Vienna in six months’ time. In the nine years after, many people have wondered if this did in fact happen. Jesse and Celine made a brief appearance in Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life but it wasn’t until Before Sunset that we found out the answer. Before Sunset takes place in Paris. Jesse has written a novel based on that night in Vienna and is at the end of a European book tour. So who should show up but Celine? The rest of the film unfolds in real time, as for an hour and a quarter, the two of them walk and talk around Paris. Hawke and Delpy improvised much of their dialogue and have screenplay credits with Linklater. Jesse is now none-too-happily married with a young son that he adores. Celine is still single, active in environmental causes, and sees herself as the kind of woman that men leave to marry someone else. The film ends in Celine’s flat, where she sings him a song she has written (he’s not the only one to have found artistic inspiration in their one previous night together) and… Well, you’ll have to watch the film for yourself, but it’s sufficiently – but perfectly – open-ended to allow the possibility of another sequel. In the UK, the two films are available separately and as a box set. Both films have anamorphic transfers in a ratio of 1.78:1. Sunrise has a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded track in the original English with two dubbed alternatives; Sunset is English only, in Dolby Digital 5.1. Oddly, the discs are differently region-coded: 2,4,5 for Sunrise and 2,5 for Sunset. Extras are disappointingly sparse: trailers for both films on the Sunrise disc and a nine-minute making-of and the theatrical trailer on Sunset. Chungking Express Wong Kar Wai, 1994 Joyfully upbeat, and energetic to the end, Chungking Express was both written and shot by the director whilst he took a break from the exhaustive filming process of Ashes of Time. Unsurprisingly, as a result it is almost the complete opposite of Wong Kar Wai’s profound epic, and remains one of his most enjoyable films to date. A character study at heart, the film is split into two distinct halves (the flawed Fallen Angels was originally intended to be a third part), each with an intriguing relationship as their subject. The first encounter is between Takeshi Kaneshiro’s heartbroken ‘Cop 223’ and Brigitte Lin’s mysterious, film noir-esque, drug-dealing femme fatale. He philosophises about his failed relationship whilst buying soon-to-be-expired cans of pineapples, and she is the enigma of the film, wearing sunglasses and a none-too-subtle blonde wig even when indoors. The second, and more straightforward of the two romances, is between another numbered cop, this time played by Tony Leung, and Faye Wong’s perpetual dreamer. Both characters are so endearing – Leung’s character with his unwillingness to accept change, even with his ‘emotionally charged towel’, and Faye with her infectious energy and liveliness in her first major on-screen role, that you can’t help but want their relationship to succeed. There are parallels between the stories, most obviously in regards to the male leads, but essentially it is purely the location that links the two together. Equally important in both, Hong Kong’s hectic and kinetic nature is captured perfectly by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, with exhilarating sequences of handheld photography as well as some inspired composition. The director’s trademark repetition is also present, with California Dreaming featuring extensively in the soundtrack of the characters’ lives, as well as hinting at their aspirations to travel to the West. Artificial Eye’s Region 2 release is excellent, boasting the most accurate transfer available as well as a stereo soundtrack with great clarity. The only downside is the lack of extras. The End of the Affair Neil Jordan, 1999 Well it does demonstrate my dull pessimism that I consider this to be my favourite romantic film but few films manage to reveal with such strength the fine distinction between lust and love or more accurately the carnal and the divine. Based on Greene"s infamously explicit novel, Jordan had to be quite ingenious to make the difficult structure work on screen - though he changes some quite crucial plot elements, it is proof of his considerable talent it still works amazingly well. Ralph Fiennes" angry rendition of Bendrix (a thinly disguised Greene) contrasts with the multi-faceted Julianne Moore as the gentle Sarah Miles with a clear on-screen chemistry and an apparent comfort with each other even in the more explicit scenes. These found the film slapped an 18 rating instead of the 15 it was expecting to receive. To be honest, I"m no major fan of bed-scenes. They often seem out of place and merely inserted to add a bit of spice to an otherwise dull film. However, in the present case, they are an integral part of the film and the measure by which one must evaluate the bizarre love-triangle that starts to form. Taking on the metaphysical world has often been a rather messy topic in modern cinema - after all how can you film something that is by its" very nature invisible and ethereal? Jordan seems self-assured throughout the film that he"s going to pull it off and he does so with brio in my mind. The film has many detractors but each time I return to watch it, it is one of those soul searing experiences where our emotions remain tangled in the lives of those we see on the screen. Romantic? That"s up to you - it certainly gets my vote. The R1 and R2 releases are pretty much the same bar a fullscreen transfer on the R1. The transfer is good and Jordan"s commentary is worth a listen though Julianne Moore"s is mostly made up of silence. A Matter of Life and Death Michael Powell, 1946 A metaphysical romantic comedy and one of the greatest British films ever made, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ continues to astonish today due to its embarrassment of cinematic riches. Visually stunning, employing huge sets and hundreds of extras, the film also boasts a screenplay that gushes with wit and a quartet of winning performances at its core. From its extraordinary beginning – a cosmic zoom that pre-empts Robert Zemeckis’ similar opening to ‘Contact’ by half a century – to the unforgettably romantic conclusion the film enchants and delights like few others before or since. As is often the case with Powell and Pressburger films, it’s the execution that dazzles – the plot itself is comparatively slight (if unorthodox): having exchanged hasty declarations of love over the intercom with June, an American WAC, young Squadron Leader Peter Carter jumps out of his doomed Lancaster without a parachute, preferring to plummet unconscious to his death rather than wait for the plane to crash. He washes up mysteriously unhurt the next morning, bumps into June and the two fall immediately in love. However, it soon transpires that Peter has been the subject of a cosmic accident: he should have died when he jumped from the plane, but the angelic ‘Conductor’ who was supposed to have accompanied him into the afterlife missed him in the English fog. When this same conductor returns to collect him, Peter refuses to go, explaining that he’s fallen in love and wants to remain on earth. A heavenly trial is arranged, in which Peter can select from history’s finest minds to represent him and plead his case. ‘Life and Death’ features all of the extraordinary talents of the Powell and Pressburger team at full stretch. Powell’s narrative momentum is arguably stronger here than in any other film, even ‘The Red Shoes’, as he tackles the challenges of moving the audience’s attention from the corporal to the ethereal with breathtaking ingenuity. Pressburger delights in the opportunities afforded to him to poke fun at conceptions of the afterlife. The favourite target of this Archer was usually the English (though his arrows were usually affectionate rather than vitriolic) and ‘Life and Death’ features some of his most delicious observations. The climactic court case, held in a vast amphitheatre floating in space, is a tour-de-force, with Dr Reeves arguing on behalf of the very British Peter against the prosecuting counsel, who happens to be the first American solider to be killed in the War of Independence! With its daring switches from celestial monochrome to gorgeous technicolour and plentiful moving camera, the film is also a highpoint for cinematographer Jack Cardiff, the first of the three masterpieces he was to make with Powell and Pressburger, while regular Archers Production Designer Alfred Junge delights in bringing us both this world and the next; a very British Heaven, with soberly beautiful uniformed angels and a signing-in book for new arrivals. For the actors, Niven and Hunter make a charming onscreen couple while Archers regulars Goring and Livesey provide more than adequate support. Carlton’s R2 DVD scores 0 for packaging but high points for the quality of the transfer and sound, plus a short interview with Jack Cardiff. Until Criterion work their magic on it, this is the copy to own. The Bank Charles Chaplin, 1915 Unlike in real life, the greatest on-screen romances are those which are doomed to failure. Charlie Chaplin understood this, and despite still being regularly dismissed as a sentimentalist to this day, was often to be found putting his Little Tramp alter-ego through as much emotional pain as physical. With The Bank, however, he tries to have it both ways: Charlie works as a janitor in the titular bank and mistakenly believes Edna Purviance has feelings for him, only to discover that they are directed towards another Charlie, the bank’s teller. After the requisite gags and romantic disappointment the mood shifts with an armed robbery, one that reveals the love rival to be a coward and lands heroic Charlie into the arms of Edna. Except that it doesn’t...he’s been asleep on the job and wakes up resigned to the fact it is never to be. Though as technically crude as his other Essanay efforts, The Bank was Chaplin’s first truly mature work, something all the more surprising considering his immense workload during 1915 (14 shorts and an abandoned feature). During this time he had built up a gradual on- and off-screen rapport with regular leading lady Purviance, aiding their scenes immeasurably, and had begun to flirt with the idea of introducing more serious elements into his work. It shows most prominently in The Bank, so much so that you could remove all of the jokes (or simply refuse to laugh at them) and still be left with an achingly emotional core. A restored and tinted The Bank is currently available on region 2 as part of the BFI’s second volume of their two Charlie Chaplin: The Essanay Films releases. Cyrano de Bergerac Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990 Boy meets girl is an common element in a large number of films and the love interest aspect is practically essential for any Hollywood film, but for a film to be a true romantic love story there needs to be an element of adversity and the greater the forces that keep the couple apart, the greater the love story. There are two essential variations on this theme – one favouring the female perspective and the other the male perspective. From a female point of view, the prototype for a romantic film is ‘Cinderella’ – a plain, ordinary girl whose true beauty is uncovered by a rich, handsome prince who sweeps her off her feet, marries her and they live happy ever after. This type of approach is best exemplified in films like ‘Pretty Woman’, ‘Pretty In Pink’ and most recently ‘The Prince & Me’ (or just about anything with Princess or Pretty in the title). The romantic film from a male point of view takes ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as its model – an ugly, disfigured guy can’t get a girl, so turns his spite upon the world, while remaining faithful to an impossible love. Personally, I’d argue that this is the better model for a story – the key element of adversity is taken to its extreme, the love is unrequited and the guy doesn’t get the girl at the end. To support this view I offer the fact that three of the greatest love stories ever committed to film fit this model to one extent or another – ‘King Kong’, ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’. ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ is the most romantic story ever told, delivered most effectively in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s luscious version from 1990 starring Gerard Depardieu (and please, nobody dare mention Steve Martin’s dreadful ‘Roxanne’ in my presence). Disfigured by an exceptionally large and ugly nose, Cyrano is convinced that no woman could love such a face, but he is so in love with his cousin Roxanne that he will do anything to make her happy, even if it means convincing her through his own letters that a dumb but handsome cadet is everything she dreams of in a man. To maintain the illusion of a perfect love, Cyrano will take his secret with him to the grave. Rappeneau tackles the film perfectly, taking the film’s romance to epic proportions, with swashbuckling adventures and extravagantly florid declarations of love. The rhyming couplet script, based on a play by Edmund Rostand, is perfect in this respect and well translated into rhyming English subtitles by Anthony Burgess. On DVD, the film fares less well – all international versions as far as I am aware presenting a faded, non-anamophic 1.66:1 transfer with burnt-in subtitles, apart from the French edition which has no subtitles at all. A new improved edition of this great film is long overdue. Comments Please login to post comments or replies.