The movie Florence Pugh thinks everybody needs to see: “I am always telling people to watch”
There’s nothing quite like a crushing romance that will convince you love doesn’t exist and all relationships are doomed to fail. In the world of Hollywood, many directors have favoured less optimistic and sometimes more realistic portrayals of love, no matter how depressing they might be. From the tragic ending to La La Land in which Damien Chazelle leaves us with the idea that you have to sacrifice love to realise your dreams and that ambition will always come first, or the complex relationship between Jessie and Celine in Before Midnight, you can always count on the movies to give you a multi-dimensional perspective on any experience.
While it might be discomforting to be confronted with the universal problems that plague so many relationships and shatter the illusion of romanticism, it is also necessary to understand the reality of love and the challenges it can bring. It is equally fulfilling as it is difficult, and while Hollywood sometimes likes to sugarcoat relationships with montages of couples kissing in the rain and dancing on beaches, it is simply not reflective of real life, and actually does love a disservice.
This is perhaps something that inspired Derek Cianfrance to make his 2010 film Blue Valentine, with the film charting the early highs of young love and the sobering lows of marriage and long-term commitment. Not all relationships fall to the same depressing fate as Dean and Cindy, but it certainly paints a picture of how love can be changed by the hurdles of everyday life and tainted by time.
The film follows their relationship from the very beginning, showing their infatuation and honeymoon phase as they are completely obsessed with each other. However, after marrying each other and starting a family together, things start to crumble, and the once madly in love couple now loathe each other and can barely tolerate their respective flaws.
It is a very harsh look at love that doesn’t paint the central couple through the rose-tinted glasses that are often applied to movie relationships, something that is expertly captured through Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling’s performances.
After recently starring in a love story herself, Florence Pugh had some thoughts on the film and described it as one of her all-time favourites, saying, “The one I am always telling people to watch is Blue Valentine. I just think everything about both of those performances [Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams] is so subtle and beautiful. And also cinematically, the lighting is incredible in that, it’s so bizarre”.
There is a desperation to both performances in the film, with each character clinging onto the fragments of their early love while despising the other and knowing that they are no longer happy. As well as this, it is shot in a strange and heightened way, capturing the highs of budding romance and how it isolates you in this bubble, all before the bubble is popped and everything feels dead and lifeless. It is one of the greatest love stories of all time, even if it might be a soul-destroying watch.
