Just got home after watching Like Crazy.
Spoilers.
This film illustrates love in a way that seems as overwhelmingly all-encompassing as it is heartbreakingly distant. It’s unusual for a romantic film not to be in some way morally didactic but here there’s nothing more than a series of moments in a romance captured of film: it doesn’t impose anything on its audience.
This comes through particularly in its script, or, that is, the lack of it. The dialogue is so natural and human, with each character having their own nuances and habits in their language. These characters come as close to human as you can get. From moments of nervousness and gentle flirtation at the beginning of the film to moments of awkwardness, longing and despair at the end, the speech is emotionally loaded to carry its audience along. Nothing overly profound, no revelatory speeches, no heartbroken monologues, just genuine conversation with emotional subtext. As the film progresses, and the audience gets to know the characters, it becomes easier and easier to see beneath the surface of their language. It becomes easier to empathise with them.
No judgement is passed on the characters by the script, director or actors. These characters are built as fleshed-out humans, rather than for function. The audience is free to pass their own judgements as to who they agree with, who they don’t like, who they sympathise with, who is in the wrong, it generates an authentic human response.
It’s ending, I must say, is fantastic. I was convinced by the half way mark that this film would end in one of the two conventional ways: either this couple would get together and live happily-ever-after, or this couple would decide to go their own ways and find their bittersweet happiness in their separate countries. Of course, if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that it’s actually neither of these. Somehow, amazingly, they find the most hopeless, upsetting ending from the wreckage of these two characters’ lives. It’s a truly devastating, but amazing, ending.
Its choppy directing and lack of soundtrack reinforces its authenticity, creating a world where things can play out in real time, or the camera can skip ahead with a cut to a sequence in the same room. It’s almost like a home movie, capturing everything as accurately as the notebooks that the girlfriend so meticulously keeps.
In a film-literate society, audiences have learnt to live with predictability. This film completely disobeys everything that we might have gone in assuming, and, within a few minutes of the film starting, you’re so caught up in this romance that you’re not noticing formula, function or convention. This is, undoubtedly, the best study of human intimacy since Blue Valentine. And, as much as it can leave you depressed and feeling alone, it’s a definite watch for anybody interested in seeing something affectionate other than the typical sob-story films that so frequently appear in cinema.
