“Shame” (1968)
In many of the films on this list, the central relationships are put to the test mostly by interior factors —self-doubt, a lack of fidelity and a lack of trust. “Shame” is one that sees our heroes drawn apart by exterior factors beyond their control, while still exposing a difficulty in the dynamic that likely would have come about in any circumstance. Somewhat overlooked in Ingmar Bergman’s canon, this film sees the actors most associated with the director, Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman, as Jan and Eva Rosenberg, a married couple trying to escape a war that’s closing in on them. They’re tormented by the sinister Colonel Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand), and find the horrors of conflict revealing sides of themselves that they’d rather the other never saw. Bergman had interrogated marriage and male-female relationships before and after “Shame,” but by taking the dynamic that he often examined —a strong-willed woman and a weak, sensitive man— and framing it around a near-dystopian conflict, as well as drawing from the history of 20th century conflict without suggesting a particular location or cause, it becomes something bigger and more rigorous in its examination of both human nature and the things that we come to discover about what our loved ones will do to survive. It’s a bleak film even by the director’s standards —the final moments with the couple in a boat trapped by floating bodies as Eva relates a dream she once had are especially haunting, albeit in a beautiful way— but one that should mark among his best and certainly among his most incisive examinations of relationships.
“Stazione Termini” (1953)
Curiously, Vittorio De Sica filmed this 1953 melodrama, starring Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift (at his most gorgeous), and while both are very good, we’d take the less-compromised “Stazione Termini” over the studio-tinkered “Indiscretion Of An American Wife” any day. Quite the Harvey Weinstein of his day, superproducer David O. Selznick spearheaded the teaming of De Sica with two U.S. stars, but the resulting 89-min real-time film which sees Jones as a housewife who’s fallen in love with Clift’s local Giovanni and is trying to break it off with him, was not at all to Selznick’s liking. So he cut over 20 minutes out (meaning he had to shoot a separate short “Autumn in Paris” to bring the package up to distributable length), mainly by shearing away a great deal of De Sica’s trademark ground-level observations. This is particularly evident in the scene where Jones’ unfaithful wife and mother give chocolate to some kids: when the camera’s on them, it’s could be an outtake from “Bicycle Thieves” (complete with potentially excessive sentiment). But when it cuts back to their patroness eyeing them limpidly, it feels pointed: America as benevolent provider. Still, castrated and cauterized though Selznick’s ‘Indiscretion’ is, it can’t conceal the genuine emotion and surprising sexiness of this doomed romance, as Monty and Jones battle their irresistible attraction in Rome’s main train station, while life thrums and buzzes all around. And in the full, uncompromised version, it becomes like a neo-realist riff on “Brief Encounter,” as the central duo is brought alive by the hum of the surrounding city.
“To the Wonder” (2013)
With “To the Wonder,” Terrence Malick drifted even further out into the ether of non-narrative dreamscaping than he had with “The Tree of Life,” leaving conventional storytelling techniques behind in favor of even more voiceover, even more hazy visual poetry and way, way more golden-tinted magic hour shots. The director’s detractors whined that “To the Wonder” was little more than an indulgent, large-scale experiment, and while it’s true that the film plays more like a collection of odds-and-ends Malick B-sides than the great, cohesive concept album that was “The Tree of Life,” even minor Malick is major by pretty much anyone else’s standards. As such, “To the Wonder” is undeniably a mess, but it’s a fascinating one, and its glimmering evocation of the birth and death stages of love is rapturous and often overwhelming. Ben Affleck plays Neil, an American abroad who falls for a ravishing, recently divorced Ukrainian woman named Marina (Olga Kurylenko). They frolic in the park, take the subway together, and pledge their undying love for one another. In one of the most sensually ravishing sequences of Malick’s career, the two star-crossed lovers travel to the icy, remote reaches of Mont St. Michel, and the barren, otherworldly vibe of the landscape almost feels like they’ve inhabited an alien planet (there are deep shades of Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” here). It is only after Neil takes Marina back to the small-town American town that he grew up in that the cracks in their relationship begin to show. A woozy, hallucinatory art film, a heartbreaking look at the expiration date of a relationship and perhaps Malick’s most shapeless and confounding movie to date, “To the Wonder” never really comes together as a whole, but as a series of scattered snapshots capturing a blossoming love that eventually wilts and rots, it’s often mesmerizing.
“Two Lovers” (2008)
Even in a filmography packed with big emotional moments and grand melodramatic reveals, James Gray’s “Two Lovers” is remarkably raw and personal. It’s a film of fresh wounds and romantic battle scars: a love story for the modern age that is nothing short of colossal in its power. Many will unfortunately remember Gray’s galvanic and eruptive drama as the last great turn from star Joaquin Phoenix before he entered the bearded-megalomania (read: performance art) stage of his career with “I’m Still Here”. Which is a shame, because this is some of the most restrained and beautiful acting work to be seen yet from the famously explosive actor, even if it can’t match the gruesome memorability factor of his cocaine-fueled meltdown in pal/director Casey Affleck’s big cinematic in-joke. In “Two Lovers,” Phoenix plays Leonard, a sad, wounded Brighton Beach man doing his best to live day to day after a series of failed suicide attempts. With a quietly dazzling but still unobtrusive attention to lived-in detail, the film observes Leonard entering the orbit of two very different women: the kind Sandra (Vinessa Shaw, in a one of a kind turn), with whom he has been set up by his parents, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a passionate soul who lives for the night, and also for the incumbent powders, pills and meaningless fun. The scenes of push and pull between this tangled romantic trifecta are masterfully observed and Gray shoots his native New York City with a clarity and sense of awe that many of his contemporaries lack (it’s also worth noting that this is the director’s first film that does not somehow classify as a crime picture). A breathtaking portrait of grief and loss and a slept-on gem from the mid-2000’s, “Two Lovers” is serious about its pain —so much so that it’ll leave you shaking.
“Revolutionary Road” (2008)
Richard Yates’ novel “Revolutionary Road” a rather neglected book that saw new life at the beginning of the 21st century, is a sort of Mount Everest of troubled-marriage books, and while Sam Mendes’ film adaptation isn’t perfect, it’s nevertheless a wrenching and handsome attempt. The film sees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, a couple in suburban Connecticut who dream of moving to Paris, but whose dreams are interrupted by their infidelity, heavy drinking and circumstances beyond their control. It’s a tough watch — there’s a little relief, but it’s mostly dominated by the central pair’s combustible relationship, blown up by both their own squandered futures and the difficulty of sustaining love, and for many the film became a bit like picking over roadkill: endlessly dissecting without ever finding much more new to say than it already did. But that’s to overlook the humanity, the very real compassion that Yates, and Mendes, have for these characters, and it’s something of a masterstroke for the director to reunite for the first time Winslet and DiCaprio, the pre-eminent screen couple of their age thanks to “Titanic” — both are tremendous, and bring not just a sense of how much these two hate each other, but how much they love each other too.
Honorable Mentions: Cinema isn’t exactly lacking in movies about failing relationships —we already covered similarly territory in a slightly different feature with a different line-up of movies, and even beyond that, there’s more we could have included. Among the ones we discussed before were “Husbands And Wives,” “Take This Waltz,” “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof,” “Modern Romance” and “Scenes From A Marriage.”
Beyond that, there’s plenty more, including more from de Sica (“Their Children Are Watching Us”) and Ozu (“Flavor Of Green Tea Over Rice”), plus Diane Kurys’ “Entre Nous,” Zujuwalski’s “Possession,” Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning By Numbers,” Marlon Brando starrer “Reflections In A Golden Eye,” “Les Parents Terribles,” Gillian Armstrong’s underrated “The Last Days Of Chez Nous,” Louis Malle’s “Les Amants,” Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante,” Otto Preminger’s “The Sundowners,” Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” Leo McCarey’s “The Awful Truth,” Doug Liman’s “Mr. And Mrs. Smith” and Lubitsch’s “That Uncertain Feeling.” There’s loads more beyond that too, but if you have any particular favorites we didn’t mention, shout them out below.
– Oliver Lyttelton, Nicholas Laskin
