Viewers share characters’ sense of loss
Story teaches us about fragility of relationships
Love Is Strange ★★★ 1/2 (out of five) Starring: John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, Directed by: Ira Sachs Running time: 94 minutes
Love is strange. Mmmmmm. Once you’ve had it, you’re in an awful fix. Mmmmmm.
As these familiar song lyrics make clear, being in love is a state of absurd, intellectual acceptance of nonlinguistic expression. We go from self-recognition of lost control: “Love is strange.” To the childlike bliss of “Mmmmmm.” And we do it in one fluid act of falling, believing we’re elevating ourselves to a higher state. Love isn’t just strange, it’s irrational, which is why movies about love, of any kind, are typically more suspenseful, dramatic and compelling than gratuitous explosions — because you never know what’s going to happen next.
Ira Sachs’s Love Is Strange is a perfect example of this because it’s a very simple story of two men who’ve been together for 40 years suddenly torn apart by circumstance.
Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) shared a life in the humble Greenwich Village apartment they called home, but when George loses his job at the school where he teaches music, the couple is forced to move out, and separate.
They say it’s only for the short term. They believe they will find a new place, but New York City’s real estate market is becoming inaccessible to people like Ben and George, and they are falling through the cracks.
Their friends and family offer support, and this is where most of the gentle humour in Sachs’s piece comes from: the moments where each man is forced to rediscover bits and pieces of himself through new surroundings, or where we’re simply watching Lithgow sprawled out on the bottom bunk of a boy’s room in his pyjamas.
Everyone in the film behaves with humanity and common sense, so nothing all that eventful really happens. Time passes. And we watch Ben and George navigate a new reality, sometimes as comedy, but always with pathos. The movie seems to teeter on the brink of tragedy with its earnest tone and somewhat fragile characters, but there is lightness in every breath of dialogue, an inner sense of forgiveness that allows George and Ben to be imperfect while remaining sympathetic.
Alone in their apartment, Ben and George had grown used to each other’s presence in the room. They flowed around each other like water, and the two leads communicate this beautifully in the opening sequence as they move around each other in the kitchen.
We sense their intimacy, and as a result, we share the loss when they’re forced into separate digs.
And though it’s the whole spur for the story, it’s the hardest thing for the viewer to really process: Surely, if someone could offer a single bed, how much harder is it to offer a double? And would their separation have been treated with any more urgency if they were straight?
Yet, there is no doubt this sort of thing really does happen, usually due to infirmity or illness, and now due to real-estate squeezing. But it all seems needlessly cruel. And maybe this was the nail Sachs was hammering the whole time: That we need to make room in our heads, in our hearts, on our sofa, for the other. Inside this subtle soup of observational humour and big city blues, there is a universal truth about relationships and how they define us, not just to others and to ourselves, but in physical space.