Love isn’t all just longing looks and passionate kisses – though you’ll find plenty of those across the week of SBS World Movies Falls in Love. Each of these five films takes love as its subject, and then finds a way to go beyond the movie clichés (fun as they can be) to shine a light on the way love can connect us to something bigger, and open the door to a side of ourselves we rarely set free.
It’s a week of passion and desire – even if those desires aren’t always met in the way we might expect.
The Face of Love
At first The Face of Love seems set to focus on the downside of giving your heart to another, as Nikki (Annette Bening) struggles to come to terms with life without Garret (Ed Harris), her husband who drowned on their 30th anniversary (she found the washed-up body). Then she meets divorced painter Tom (Harris again), the spitting image of her dead love. And she decides she has to have him.
On one level this is setting up the traditional rom-com relationship – the kind where two people meet but one is hiding a dark secret. The closer they get, the more the secret hangs over the relationship, until it finally comes out and tears apart everything they’ve built. But here Nikki’s passionate, desperate secret feels like the only thing holding her together, even as their relationship builds and she’s forced to hide Tom from everyone who knew Garret (including the neighbour who pines after her, played by Robin Williams). It’s an over-the-top situation given real depth by Bening’s performance: given the chance, who wouldn’t want to try again with the love that got away?
The Face of Love airs on SBS World Movies at 8.30pm, Monday 14 February. It is also streaming at SBS On Demand.
First Love
Putting a different twist on another tried and true romantic cliché is First Love. A young couple thrown together for one crazy night might seem like a standard set-up for romance, but you’ve never seen it told like this, as notorious Japanese director Takashi Miike turns his high-energy style to this tale of love on the run on the streets of Tokyo.
Boxer Leo (Masakata Kubota) has a terminal illness; Monica (Sakurako Konishi) is a sex worker caught up in a Yakuza drug-smuggling scheme. Thrown together with a pack of flamboyant villains hot on their heels, this features plenty of Miike’s trademark violence (it’s a full three minutes until the first severed head rolls into view) and off-beat plotting (the story also features ghosts). But the central bond between a brooding man of violence and a damsel in distress remains surprisingly romantic throughout the carnage; sometimes love blooms in the strangest places.
First Love airs on SBS World Movies at 8.30pm, Tuesday 15 February. It is also streaming at SBS On Demand.
On Chesil Beach
Young love of a very different kind is the focus of On Chesil Beach. Set in 1962, this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella is the story of Edward (Billy Howle) and Florence (Saoirse Ronan), who meet at university, fall in love, get married, and then on their quiet beach-side honeymoon finally start to get to know exactly who it is that they’ve chosen to spend their life with.
A close-focus study of a time when sex was both an oppressive expectation and a near-total mystery, it’s a look at just how fragile love can be and how the best intentions don’t matter when the person you’ve given your heart to is in many ways a stranger. It’s not exactly a feel-good romance, but as a look at what intimacy really means, this quietly devastating film isn’t one you’ll forget in a hurry.
On Chesil Beach airs on SBS World Movies at 8.30pm, Wednesday 16 February. It is also streaming at SBS On Demand.
Finding Your Feet
At the other end of the scale in more ways than one is Finding Your Feet, a look at late-life love and new beginnings that’s a feel-good hug for both the characters and the audience. When somewhat snooty Lady Sandra Abbott (Imelda Staunton) discovers her husband is cheating on her (with her best friend no less), she flees to her free-spirited older sister (Celia Imrie) to figure out her next move.
While it’s Sandra who finds new love with handyman Charlie (Timothy Spall) at a dance class, it’s the rediscovered connection between the sisters that’s the real love story at the centre of Finding Your Feet. The bond between the very different sisters is heartfelt and real, thanks to moving performances from Staunton and Imrie; of all the second chances on offer here, it’s their relationship you’ll most want to succeed.
Finding Your Feet airs on SBS World Movies at 8.30pm, Thursday 17 February. It is also streaming at SBS On Demand.
Dancing At Lughnasa
Dancing is a path to romance in Finding Your Feet. In Dancing At Lughnasa, the love it expresses is the deeper, more nuanced love found within a family. The year is 1936 and eight-year-old Michael (Darrell Johnston) is living in rural Ireland with his unmarried mother (Catherine McCormack) and his four aunts. It seems an ideal existence to a child; with hindsight, the situation is more fraught.
The arrival of men – brother Jack (Michael Gambon) and Michael’s estranged father Gerry (Rhys Ifans) – only rocks the boat further. It’s a story about memory and growing up, but what lingers is the bond between the very different sisters (led by Meryl Streep). The love between them is sometimes frayed; they’re living in each other’s pockets, struggling to find space to breathe. But when they dance together, all that falls away. It’s the perfect note to end a week of movies about love: after all the striving for connection, it’s love that keeps us together.
Dancing At Lughnasa airs on SBS World Movies at 8.30pm, Friday 18 February. It is also streaming at SBS On Demand.
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