We'll always have Paris: Pain, loss, remorse make it romantic at the movies

We'll always have Paris: Pain, loss, remorse make it romantic at the movies


By Jay Stone, Vancouver Sun, February 9 2010


Romance, n.: an exaggeration, a picturesque falsehood. (Concise Oxford Dictionary)

Okay, it's meaning No. 5, but the one you're probably thinking of — "a love story" — is only No. 4. Romance is a staple at the movies, right up there with picturesque falsehood, but at its best it's not all skipping through the roses to a medley of 1960s hits. Indeed, its essence is something author Anita Brookner called "sadness and impossibility."

Brookner is a fine one to cite, I know: she's the author of drawing room dramas whose heroines are often abandoned to pathetic loneliness. But she has a point about romance. In the best love stories, sadness and impossibility are at centre stage.

You see only hints of that in romantic comedy. In romantic comedy, the two people who are made for each other meet, do wonderful being-in-love things (shopping, running hand-in-hand through the park, making gauzy love while fireworks explode in the sky or trains run erotically into tunnels), have an argument, typically over something inconsequential, realize their error, and drive quickly to an airport to reunite. In the better rom-coms, they don't have to drive all the way there: in Breakfast at Tiffany's, for instance, Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard are going to the airport together in a cab (she's bound for a flight to South America) when they stop, get out, and kiss in the rain. I almost forgot kissing in the rain. That usually happens just after skipping through the park.

This pattern has become so embedded that romantic comedy has strained at the edges trying to find barriers for its heroes to overcome: people started travelling through time or being fictional. Even in movies that were pure love stories, rather than rom-coms, the barrier problem persisted as inconsequential arguments gave way to things like actual death (Truly Madly Deeply, say, or Ghost), although even that couldn't stand in the way of picturesque falsehood. But oh, what a lovely lie.

The key is that it's picturesque. F. Scott Fitzgerald — admittedly another imperfect source when it comes to love stories — differentiated between a sentimental person, who thinks things will last, and a romantic, who hopes against hope that they won't. That definition evokes the bittersweet feeling of Casablanca, perhaps the most romantic of all movies: they're in love, but he gives her up for the noble cause of something greater (in this case, the Second World War.) Rick, the character played by Humphrey Bogart, is occasionally accused of being a sentimentalist, and indeed, under his cynical exterior we see a man who has been broken — broken by love, it turns out — and who needs only a call to arms to reignite his greater passion. He's a romantic, a man waiting for salvation.

Casablanca has a happy-sad ending that has never really been equalled in movies, although they have tried: the great love story is differentiated from the romantic comedy mostly by the conclusion. If the couple gets together, it was a comedy. If they don't, it was romance.

This was something Fitzgerald knew, even though he was a mostly failed screenwriter. He went to Hollywood several times, but nothing much happened until 1937, when he returned for a couple of years and worked on several movies that didn't amount to much (A Yank At Oxford, Madame Curie). He met gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and she lived with him for the rest of his sad and picturesque life. If you're interested in the romanticized version, watch the film Beloved Infidel with Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald and Deborah Kerr as Graham.

The real Fitzgerald finished one screenplay. It was for a movie called Three Comrades, a sad romance about three soldiers in love with a woman dying of tuberculosis. Dying of tuberculosis is one of the most romantic things that can happen (Camille, et al), because it puts deathless love into sharper relief.

Around the same time, Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter saying, "What I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better." The aching feeling of doom in that self-evaluation is as sad as anything faced by Jay Gatsby. It’s the cry of the romantic hoping it doesn’t last.

Here are five movies that express the bittersweet allure of romance:

Casablanca: The ideal love story: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman had an affair and they're still in love, but they have to give it up for a greater cause. The tone is wartime cynicism and tired nobility, the dialogue is timeless, and there's Dooley Wilson singing As Time Goes By. Play it, Sam. Again.

Moonstruck: The most operatic of romantic comedies is the story of a woman (Cher) who gives up a reasonable man when she falls in love with an unreasonable one (Nicolas Cage). The moon hangs low over everyone's passions ("Cosmo's moon," they call it) and while boy finally gets girl, they're all aware that love is the worst thing that can happen to anyone. The worst and the best.

Titanic: Big story, big problems: the poor boy falls in love with the rich girl on the RMC Hubris, the ship that wouldn't sink. We know the voyage is doomed, but we're hooked on the romance: Will Leonardo DiCaprio win the heart of Kate Winslet? Will they survive the sinking? Better still, will only their memories make it? This is a big-budget paean to the sweet brevity of true love.

The English Patient: More tragedy, this time told in flashback, as a dying Ralph Fiennes remembers his affair with Kristin Scott Thomas, the married woman whom had to leave behind, injured, in a desert cave, as he went for help. There are several other love stories and tragedies to negotiate, and some viewers were impatient with the film's twists, but its lushness and its grand passions are intoxicating.

Romeo and Juliet: Even more romantic than Titanic, to which it bears a passing resemblance, the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version of Shakespeare's play — the one with Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting — is the quintessential star-crossed tragedy. Even without moving the action to the streets (as in West Side Story), Zeffirelli turns teenage longing into an aching tale of ill-fated passion.