To love is to suffer
Happy Love Day everyone! I hope Cupid brought you chocolates and a keen reminder by way of Dostoyevsky that, “To love is to suffer, and there can be no love otherwise.”
I have been in love and had my heart broken, but I wouldn’t call myself a love expert. My philosophy is somewhere between that of Miss Havisham’s, that love is, “blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission,” and Cher’s (admittedly outside the confines of gender) that it’s, “A luxury, like dessert. Absolutely not a necessity.”
A relationship isn’t a priority for me now, and hasn't been when I've been in one as I find the Venn Diagram between myself and Reynolds ‘Is it because you think I don’t need you? I don’t.’ Woodcock becomes a mere circle.
A boyfriend once called me in the throes of a quarter-life crisis, asking to see me. My calendar was full of ballet classes, cinema visits and dinner with my friend Camilla1, so I told him with all the warmth and encouragement of a GP’s receptionist that I wasn’t free for another nine days. Nearly four years later, I still maintain that I was right not to change my plans for something so passé.
Last Summer, I broke up with someone via text, and having had the Asteroid City soundtrack on repeat, the first song I played after I pressed send was Jingle Jangle Jingle by Tex Ritter, the opening line of which is, “Yippee yeah, there’ll be no wedding bells for today!”
I'm aware these anecdotes paint me in a rather callous light, but I watched A Single Man on Monday night and wept. I adore love, I loved being in love - I mean, I felt like I was constantly delirious in an Isabelle Adjani in Possession kind of way, which was useful because the person I was in love with usually responded to my texts ninety hours after I sent them, and it's hard to sustain momentum for that long without chemical intervention.
Sometimes I think I isolate myself for fear of not being hurt, but then I go on Hinge for five minutes and realise that I am a delicate angel, seeking connection in a cruel world. And don’t even get me started on my friends' boyfriends2.
For the past few years, I've only commemorated Valentine’s Day with a romantic film, but last year I decided to go down the demented path and watch Eyes Wide Shut instead. I had planned to go even further this year and watch Salò, a choice my friend communicated his disgust at by saying my name very firmly3, but a change in circumstances means I might want something more lighthearted.
I don’t know what your days will look like, but I do know film, so here are some non-demented, Valentine-appropriate watches about love you probably haven’t seen4 in case you need them.
The Charming One - I Know Where I’m Going!
I’ve written about my love for this film before, but illness warranted a repeat viewing the other day, and my certainty that it's a perfect film is stronger than ever. With ancient familial curses, sweeping Scottish landscapes and Roger Livesey in both a Naval uniform and a kilt, it makes one ask the eternal question - when is a Laird going to sweep me off my feet?
The Sexually Frustrated One - Vivacious Lady
Never has a film catered to the female gaze so much. Starring Ginger Rogers and then-boyfriend Jimmy Stewart, whom she suggested for the part (at last, a win for nepotism is a win for us all), Vivacious Lady is the story of a nightclub singer and a Botany professor who marry after a one-day courtship. It sounds ridiculous, but if Jimmy Stewart looked at me the way he looks at Ginger Rogers, I’d marry him after a day too. The couple returns to Stewart’s family home unable to tell them about their marriage, and far more importantly, consummate it. Funny and desperately horny, it is a masterclass in circumventing The Hays Code.
The Platonic One - Girlfiends
Aspiring photographer Susan struggles to establish her career after her flatmate moves out to get married. Deeply moving, it is an ode to the love we have for our friends and the love we cannot give to them when they leave us behind. It is also about the love we need to have for ourselves and the confidence to try and make our dreams a reality. Bittersweet and joyous, Christopher Guest is particularly easy on the eye, though the sight of Bob Balaban with hair is rather disconcerting.
The Fun One - Indiscreet
Ingrid Bergman is a successful actress with no time for a relationship until Cary Grant literally walks through her front door. The only issue? He’s married. I can’t say too much more without giving something away, but Indiscreet is a fun, easy watch with a scene that had me screaming into my couch. Filmed at locations such as the Royal Opera House and the Painted Hall at Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College, it makes a distant Londoner feel almost sentimental.
The Demented One - Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Did you know that Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky had an affair, just like I had an affair with Sam Reid5? Chanel and Stravinsky did know each other, but despite a lack of compelling historical evidence, Chris Greenhalgh nevertheless persisted in writing a book about their ‘affair’. The book is not good, but I am convinced that the screen adaptation (also written by Greenhalgh - please explain?) is one of the greatest and profoundly misunderstood films of all time.
It starts, as all excellent movies do, with a near twenty-minute reenactment of the premiere of The Rite of Spring and subsequent riot filmed on location at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Anna Mouglalis as Coco Chanel is the best a woman has ever looked, and Mads Mikkelsen, somehow no less sexy for donning Stravinsky’s glasses and thin moustache, proves that Russophobic typecasting is alive and well as he speaks some of the worst Russian I’ve ever heard.
A film about a creative couple’s creative differences, it is almost primal in its depiction of the inevitable conflicts between men and women, made all the better by Chanel and Stravinsky’s constant smoking, fucking and listening to The Rite of Spring.
I don’t think the sexiness of The Rite, especially the wave-like climaxes in the introduction to Le Sacrifice6 is celebrated enough, but, at long last, here is a film that uses it in multiple scenes of Stravinsky melancholically wandering around forests, snooping around Chanel’s villa and bashing it out on the piano when he gets angry that Coco isn’t DTF.
I know one shouldn’t necessarily aspire to be like Coco Chanel, but Anna Mouglalis’ performance has carried me through the tides of heartbreak and made me the woman I am today. She is the mother I never had, she is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don’t know a better person.
Her gaze is steely, her cigarette-laden delivery matter of fact, when she speaks dialogue that I cling to like a prayer, “I’m as powerful as you, Igor, and more successful.”
If you are an artist and you want to break up with your boyfriend because you think he is crushing your dreams, this movie will tip you over the edge. And I'll be there, waiting to congratulate you with a bottle of champagne and a Tex Ritter record.
Thank you so much for reading! It means the world. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a link, it really helps.
If you do watch any of the films, please do let me know your thoughts! Otherwise, I’ll see you next week - L x
Camilla George is one of my coolest friends and dinner with her is not a privilege I forget in a hurry.
Except you, Andrew xxx
I read The Misfortunes of Virtue at 16, I’ll be fine!
None of them have more than 30,000 recorded watches on Letterboxd
It’s why he wears Dr Martens all the time - to lessens the height difference.
Especially if Daddy Valery is conducting - jeez Louise!