In a world where romance on screen is sold to us from a young age, we are rarely offered anything but a mix of well-known clichés. A movie that escapes this pattern can teach us a lot more about relationships than dozens of Disney films, rom-coms, and melodramas. Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy stands apart because it is not only a story about falling in love – it is a story about loving.

It all starts in Before Sunrise (the first installment of the trilogy) with a young American (Ethan Hawke) spotting an alluring Frenchwoman (Julie Delpy) on a train. They enjoy their conversation so much that when the train stops in Vienna, they get off together so that they can continue it. Then every nine years (by way of a new Before film) we get another glimpse of their lives and observe how this conversation has evolved. As Roger Ebert put it, these movies prove that our minds are our most erotic organs. 

Before Sunrise (1995) delights us with its authenticity. The story of Jesse and Celine is romantic primarily because it feels real. When they stand in a music booth, casting uncertain glances at each other, we feel their nervousness as if we were there with our crush. When they talk about parents, death, their first time, God, or gender roles, we relate to them because we are reminded about our own ‘deep’ conversations. Their hesitant gestures of affection seem as if they had butterflies in their belly, partly wanting to have a try, partly being afraid of rejection. And when Celine and Jesse make their goodbyes, the intensity of the moment is tremendously overwhelming. As a simply shot film, Before Sunrise proves that ‘normal’ movies with no excessive means of expression can have much more profound impact than even the greatest melodramas. 

Before Sunset (2004) is just like its predecessor, but better. Jesse and Celine are no longer young, full of hope and naïvety, and their relationship is more psychologically complex. They meet in Paris during the promotion of Jesse’s book, which is about a night spent in Vienna with a pretty Frenchwoman (sound familiar?), nine years after they last saw each other. The pressure of their approaching farewell is even more tangible this time around because Jesse needs to catch a flight back to America in an hour. There is an underlying sense of bitterness and disappointment that colors their discussions of life experience, a sentiment which is reinforced when they realize that Celine studied in New York at the same time Jesse lived there. How many times could they have run into each other? The thing is, they didn’t– a fact that makes us painfully aware that, on the most basic level, our lives are ruled by coincidences. That’s why when you meet a person on a train with whom you have an instinctive connection, you’d better take a full advantage of it, because such things don’t happen often. 

Before Sunset teaches us that relationships aren’t perfect, but are rather full of hidden emotions, unspoken words, moments of uneasiness, and disappointments. It is only in Before Midnight (2013) that this message takes on a whole meaning. In Before Sunset, Jesse wasn’t satisfied with his marriage and Celine was deeply resigned when it came to her own romantic relations. At the end of the film, when Celine says, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane”, and Jesse acknowledges it with a simple “I know”, audiences were left with a smile on their faces as wide as Jesse’s own. But by the end of Before Midnight, we question if there is such a thing as ‘the right person’. The ultimate point of the movie is that a relationship is not like a supermarket where you can find everything that you need to satisfy your needs. No matter how amazing the other person is and whatever you do, there will always be problems, and resentment, and tears. 

Although each part is an excellent piece on its own, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight work best as a whole. There is an elaborate interplay between the three films, and subtle cues take on  new meanings when examined through the lens of the entire trilogy. The story of Jesse and Celine touches us deeply because it makes us realize that even love stories that begin as wonderfully as theirs are subject to the wear and tear of daily life. Linklater pays tribute to a reality in which there is no ‘happily ever after’ only a hard continuous struggle to make things right. 

At this point, you might be wondering how someone could argue that this story is among the most romantic in existence. The trilogy doesn’t sell us another idealized fairytale about love– it offers us something better instead: raw emotions, authenticity, and relatable troubles. It challenges delusional images of love to show that a relationship is a living organism that needs attention and work. “If you want true love, then this is it,” Jesse tells Celine, “This is real life. It’s not perfect but it’s real, and if you can’t see it then you’re blind.” As demonstrated in all three movies, conversation is the key to building a true relationship, and conflict – its inescapable element – can serve as a means for reassessment and  betterment. The Before trilogy is romantic because Linklater reaffirms our belief in true feeling and makes the case that real love is worth the effort. The three movies are embodiments of three different components of love – passion, intimacy, and commitment – and they ultimately show us that love is a constant process, as changeable as evolution.

“unlucky.”, by Thalia Kent-Egan, is a film that, in the span of 20 minutes or so, and in the confines of a single room, carries the viewer on a melodramatic and absurd journey – escalating slowly, and then all at once. I myself, after only having watched the first half of the film, had assumed that I’d gotten the gist of it and could predict what would happen next; I was tragically wrong. Although employing sparse dialogue and one main actress (with a few small appearances from others towards the end), “unlucky.” left me feeling unsettled and unnerved, which I suppose was the intention.

In conversation with Kent-Egan, who is a fourth year student at Queens College, she told me that this is in fact her debut film; her interest in filmmaking grew after having worked in film production companies in Paris and Berlin while studying abroad last year, and she adds that she is now applying to film schools. She noted that the actors in the film are all students, found via auditions. “It was quite funny,” she added, “because we had loads of people message us saying ‘Oh we want to audition’, and we had this long list … and over the course of a week, like 3 people got ill, one girl got hit by a car, and the other girl just didn’t turn up.” Although one may take this as a bad omen, it does fit quite well with the themes of luck and misfortune explored throughout the film.

Produced by Eddie Tolmie, with cinematography by Cai Richards, the film centers on the seemingly typical morning of Cassandra Jones (played by Hannah Taylor), which veers horribly off course. It begins with Jones waking up to her phone alarm going off; picking up her phone, she declares to nobody in particular: “It will be fine. I promise.” Upon first watch, the viewer may be confused as to whom she is speaking, or what exactly she is promising; but as Kent-Egan explains, “It’s just the idea that she’s really alone and it’s quite funny how alone she is.” One must assume that Jones is making a voice memo of sorts; a stand-in for the support that she is lacking.

Jones eventually rises out of bed, opening the blinds to reveal the daylight outside, and viewers find themselves privy to her small room, sparsely decorated save for a few posters on the wall, Bowie and Ranier Werner Fassbinder (a hint towards Kent-Egan’s favorite director). As Jones lays her outfit for the day out on the ground, the viewer may suppose that the narrative portrayed here is no more than a young girl’s morning routine. And indeed it may seem so, as we watch Jones perform such quotidian tasks as getting dressed and putting cream on her face.

A turning point in the film comes when Jones rips open a pack of apples and they tumble to the floor inadvertently killing a spider. Filmed from the level of the spider itself, we see Jones poke at the dead insect with an almost gruesome delight; from this angle, other details come to light as well, such as the hole in her socks from which her toes peek through. Discarding the spider out the window, Jones hurriedly makes her bed and sits at her desk in front of her laptop, appearing nervous and twitchy.

When a video call comes through, we realize that there is some sort of Skype interview happening; Jones, startled by the incoming call, chokes on her water – a foreshadowing of sorts.

The interviewer, a Ms. Josephine Jacobi (played by Emilka Cieslak), looks eerily proper and stiff, sporting a blue cardigan. She apologizes for her cough, stating that she is a bit ill. Her exchange with Jones is exceedingly awkward, with Jacobi waiting just a moment too long to pose her questions to Jones while she takes bites of a croissant. At a certain point, Jacobi begins coughing, choking on her croissant – one cannot help but laugh at the absurdity of the moment as Jones struggles with how to help this figure who is at once proximate and impossibly far, trapped in a computer screen; “Just breath, take it slow!” she stutters. 

However, all humor is lost when one realizes that things have taken a turn for the grim; the interviewer goes silent and her head falls to the desk. Jones begins to panic, growing visibly hysterical. She phones for help to be sent to the home of Ms. Jacobi, but in her moment of hysteria, trips upon a rogue apple on the floor. As we see the interviewer being aided through the video call on the computer screen, one cannot help but to see the macabre irony in Cassandra’s own demise; and when the video call is cut short, we realize that Cassandra is now truly unreachable, trapped in her own alternate reality, where interviews end in death and apples become weapons of destruction. And although it is an absurd reality, it is gruesome nonetheless. 

“I had the idea for a Skype call going really badly wrong for a long time, actually because of my year abroad,” Kent-Egan explains. “I had lots and lots of Skype interviews for jobs, and some went so badly. And just the whole idea of a Skype interview is quite awkward … It’s really hard to feel like you’re getting the right thing across in a Skype interview because you can only see such a small part of everything.” And perhaps what a Skype interview embodies most is that line between humor and humiliation. Humor, in particular, is something Kent-Egan wanted to make sure came through.

“I did really want to get the humor across, and I still do think it’s quite funny that she dies in the end, in a very cruel way,” says Kent-Egan. Indeed, the film is almost difficult to watch due to the conflicting emotions the viewer holds towards the protagonist: should I be laughing or should I be feeling for this person? However, it is that sense of unsettlement that makes “unlucky.” so compelling. And unlike her Greek mythological namesake, that disregarded prophet of disaster, Cassandra’s life ends in a manner she could never have prophesied; she was just unlucky.

[The film can be viewed at this link: https://vimeo.com/377389480?fbclid=IwAR2nMwGBqKWVe1i2g_P9ouGd3ppCBcbCIeGdOW1L2-_7J8YkyE4NV3plMts]

When Lance Corporal Blake (Dean Charles-Chapman) selects his friend of who knows how long, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay), to assist him on a mission to prevent a ‘massacre’ that will take them far into ostensibly abandoned German territory, General Erinmore (Colin Firth) sends them off with some lines from one of British Empire’s most successful writers ringing in their ears: ‘Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne / He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ Rudyard Kipling’s words reverberate across Sam Mendes’ continuous shot film 1917 as the pair are forced to keep moving constantly, maintaining utter solitude – even as they stand alongside one another.

As well as pulling in a host of accolades, including an Oscar’s nomination for best picture, Mendes’ slick creation has also been criticised for what might appear to be a prioritisation of bleak grandeur in a deadened landscape, and for favouring flawlessly blended long takes over forging real emotional intimacy between the individuals we meet. Indeed, a New York Times  reviewer went as far as calling the film a ‘sanitized’ vision, tantamount to ‘an exercise in preening showmanship.’When we recall certain shots, including one in which we, as Schofield, shakily advance towards a red sky – choked with smoke as flames lick and light up the ruins of a 16^th century church in the tiny commune of Écoust-Saint-Mein – a sense of steely spectacle is undeniable, but far from sanitary. Indeed, we are forced to inspect the true foulness painfully slowly as Mende’s unflinchingly sharp lens hovers over the countless fly infested corpses.

What does become clear is how very little his relatively unadorned script, combined with a scarcity of close-ups, allows us to discover about the soldiers. This decision has already been slated by another major publication for the lack of interiority it grants to the men who should be the beating heart of this story, which Mendes has revealed was largely inspired by the experience of his paternal Grandfather, Alfred Mendes. Although it is clear that the script does occasionally fall flat, and vague truisms about war are articulated at times when silence would have served just as well, this particular criticism takes for granted that the real lack of intimacy the audience is allowed to develop with the protagonists is entirely unintentional. 

In fact, 1917 brings us into a landscape in which emotion is an unhelpful intrusion into the careful, cerebral forbearance demanded of the viewer as well as the soldier. This could also well be why the somewhat formulaic, sweeping orchestral score from Thomas Newman (who also worked with Mendes on his 1999 debut American Beauty), which works to steer our emotional response, comes across a touch heavy handed. When we do get glimpses of debilitating feeling intrude, as when a discussion arises about returning home for leave, we see Schofield literally turn his back on the camera, obscuring us from gaining further insight. But Mackay’s persuasive performance as a man struggling to reconcile ambivalence with loyal determination is strong enough to support some of the weaker moments of 1917.

We are certainly not told much about who is at home waiting for the pair, but we do not need to be told. Momentary glimpses into the many lives touched by this war are provided by grainy, torn photographs pinned to bunkbeds and scrappy mementos quickly stuffed back into bloodstained pockets. Where Mendes sometimes fails in developing fully fledged characters, he successfully builds a world in which taking the time to find out a name, or a story, cannot even be contemplated. A question is posed: if the soldiers we watch are not able to learn the day of the week – as we hear the sardonic Lieutenant Leslie (played impressively by Andrew Scott) joke – let alone spend their limited physical and emotional resources  learning the story of every drained figure they come across, what makes us, the audience, any different?

It is telling that, after a nod to Rudyard Kipling opens their mission, Schofield later selects lines by an English writer of an utterly different variety, Edward Lear, for whom ‘parody was a vehicle for the renewal of feeling’. He whispers,

‘They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
 In a Sieve they went to sea,
[…]
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve’

While Kipling offered his share of support to the war he so believed in, by way of public speeches and visits to the wounded,  his reflections were written from a position of relative safety. Perhaps it is in the distressing dissonance between Schofield and General Erinmore’s selection of poets, between one speculating from afar, and another walking a nonsensical landscape punctuated with the ‘blue’ bodies of horses and men, that we feel the real conflict of this film arise. If we are looking for a film about fighting a foreign enemy, this might not be it; here the conflict arises in the struggle for sense and story amongst the rats, the confusion, and the all-consuming mud. 

Romance feels a certain way; but it also looks a certain way. And the certain way that romance looks is, to my mind, filmic. I knew what romance looked like a long time before I knew what it felt like. It looked like long glances and serendipity, it sounded like orchestral score or indie folk rock. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to uncouple the looking from the feeling — and I’m not sure I want to?

I don’t like writing about love. I find it intimidating. There are so many voices, books, films that get between me and my own feelings. My own words seem occluded by a great cultural shadow — there is a mountain in the shape of two lovers holding hands that blocks out the sun. It has been carved – exquisitely, laboriously – by the long line of romancers that came before. Sometimes, when you crane your neck back and look up at it, you can’t see the peak. You become dizzy, disorientated.

Film is part of this dizziness. 

When I was in Year 8, I asked a girl to the movies. Young men ask young women to the movies — I cannot tell you where this idea came from because it came from everywhere. From classics like Grease, from kid’s TV like the Suite Life of Zac and Cody, from all the American films that blur into one. Rom-coms have an architectural precision. There is a necessary elision required to fit all the facets of meeting someone and falling in love into a 90 minute run time. There is a precise and certain narrative architecture to the rom-com genre. Therefore, rom-com told me that taking a girl to the movies was a precise and certain activity. That’s what a date was; this is what it looked like; this is what I wanted it to look like.

I asked my mum to drop me at the local shopping centre. It echoed with the sound of shoppers walking on generic, white-speckled floors. The food court was crowded with kids buying frozen cokes from Maccas. I looked towards the escalators which lead to the dark, popcorn drenched movie complex. And I checked my phone: my “date” had cancelled. Her dad wouldn’t let her go by herself, and her older sister didn’t want to spend the afternoon babysitting.

A sense of palpable relief flowed through me. I called my mum (who was still in the car park). We got noodles from the Vietnamese deli. It was delicious. I tried (I think) to be a little upset — I was not upset at all. 

And that was the last time I ever tried to go on a date with a girl.

When I think about how culture shapes perception of romance, I think about Year 8 me asking a girl to the movies. I started on a script that I had seen countless times before: all the images looked right (boy meets girl in a park, we had mutual friends, we messaged a lot), and that was all I had to go on. It looked right, so I started to perform the feeling to myself.

I’d spent my burgeoning adolescence dreaming in concert with the narratives around me. Maybe when we store daydreams and idealisations in cultural artefacts like films, those daydreams take on some of the qualities of artefacts themselves: something to be displayed in a glass case, curated alongside a polaroid, and an ivory cameo. Such artefacts can rarely handle the wear and tear of real life — frames crack, parchments tear, polaroids discolour. When “romantic” is a mode of interacting with the world, rather than a feeling, it changes how you experience the things around you.

*

Wittgenstein: The limits of my language are the limits of my world. The limits of my movies are the limits of my love?

That little kick in your stomach, the galvanic giddiness. These are feelings I now (indulgently) associate with a good romance plot. But they were missing for a long time. I thought people were overly obsessed with baking a b-plot romance arc into every genre of movie (action, adventure, coming-of-age) — growing up, every film seemed to require a man and a woman put their lips on each other. And I wasn’t convinced.

There’s a passage in EM Forster’s Maurice (written 1913, published 1971) where he talks about how the love between men is new; that it doesn’t have to follow convention; that it’s uncrowded by expectation; that it can be anything. I don’t think this is necessarily true, but to seventeen year-old me, it all started to make sense.

The year after I finished high school, I sent a passage from Maurice to a boy I was close friends with (I know). He became my first boyfriend.

Our relationship was infected with adolescent nostalgia. We knew the whole time that I would soon be moving from Australia to England to start university. We had decided not to do long distance. There was an urgency; we knew we needed to make something of what we had.

There’s that strange alchemical moment when you’re trying to transform your present moment into a memory, when you’re performing it for a future self who is going to look back with a quiet smile at your youthfulness and naivety. Except this time, as we played out the images we’d been handed, we found that some of them worked.

We watched coming of age films and Studio Ghibli together. We drove in my uncle’s second-hand car to the beach. We shared music driving along the highway at night. We sat by the river. And I would say clichés (to show that I thought we were above them). I’d say, faux-seriously, as I stretched out my hands in the wind: Do you ever feel truly infinite?  (Parodying Emma Watson’s character from Perks of Being a Wallflower). But, in some ways, to parody is to try and be close to something. We wanted it to be like a movie, because when you’re in your first relationship, that’s all you have to compare it with.

I think I’ve become more understanding and kinder to myself about having a desire to aid moments in their creation. It is, perhaps, not inauthentic to try and mould a memory in certain ways. We’ve been given these tropes: maybe we can use them? Maybe, they can push us out of our interiority? Maybe, by occupying a space that is not our “self” we can be less self-conscious? By offering ourselves up to the common ground of the trope or cliché, we are perhaps enacting a form of communion. 

Before I left to the UK, my boyfriend and I drove up a mountain to a lookout. It was a misty, cold night. We climbed over the barrier by the roadside and sat in the bushland, looking at the stars. We gave each other goodbye letters, we kissed. Then, the next day, I got on a plane to England.

It seemed fitting — just like a movie? We made ourselves fit into it: we fit ourselves into the night sky, into the pang of an ending. Sitting there, we were constantly repeating a mantra of this is it, this is it. As if reiteration was a form of inflation. As if we could grow it bigger in our minds.

When you need to mark something, when you need it to feel important, sometimes you don’t need authenticity. You don’t need a pure, individualised self — you need something above. You need ritual, you need to join the long line of romancers, you need to stand on the mountain in the shape of two lovers holding hands, and you need to briefly, beautifully feel that those hands are yours.

With his take on The Personal History of David Copperfield, Armando Iannucci seems to relish the opportunity to draw out the inherent absurdism and nearly soap-operatic drama of Dickens’ novels to create a bizarrely funny and riotously entertaining film. To watch David Copperfield is to be made increasingly aware of the novel’s origin as a serialised production, with the transitions between various episodes in the protagonist’s life as exuberantly presented as the events themselves. 

The film is framed around David’s ability to “remember great characters” he encounters, and thanks to the work of a stellar cast, the audience is sure to find them equally memorable. Dev Patel is well-suited to the wide-eyed wonder of the eponymous protagonist, underpinning David’s sense of wonder and infectious zest for life with enough dry wit and genuine pathos to ground the often-convoluted story in real warmth. 

Standout performances from other cast members include Peter Capaldi as the endearingly crooked Mr Micawber, Tilda Swinton as David’s eccentric aunt, and Hugh Laurie playing against type as the gentle and comically spaced-out Mr Dick. Gwendoline Christie is wickedly entertaining and deliciously evil in a whirlwind appearance as Jane Murdstone; equally enjoyable in an otherwise minimal role is Morfydd Clarke’s lovably ditzy Dora Spenlow. 

A special mention must go to Ben Wishaw, who totally sheds the tousle-haired dreamy-eyed romanticism that made him so well suited to play John Keats in 2009’s Bright Star in favour of an impressively awful bowl cut and an oily snivelling demeanour that seems to ooze right off him as he assumes the mantle of Uriah Heep. He seems to delight in the opportunity to be as repulsively obsequious as possible, and scenes that allow Wishaw and Patel to play off one another are enormously fun. In particular, a scene in which David joins Uriah and his mother for tea exhibits the film at its peculiarly twisted comedic best. 

The film is also a pleasure visually speaking. Beautiful animation is interspersed with constantly bold, eclectic sets, loathe to have one boring frame in the film. At times, this is to the detriment of some of the more serious story beats — the sequences in the bottle factory, for example, seem a little trite given the airy spaces and bright lighting framing the supposedly tragic events, and all the destitute homes seem to lean a little closer to ‘shabby chic’ than to ‘abject Victorian poverty’. 

Still, there is never a dull moment aesthetically speaking, and Iannucci weaves a colourful patchwork of period drama visuals turned up to 100 and made a little psychedelic. Zac Nicholson’s cinematography creates a visual embodiment of the winding serial narrative that plays as much a part in bringing the story explosively to life as do any of the performances.

Whilst the comic and absurd elements of Dickens are happily enlarged for the sake of this film, the script is quite content to do away with some of the heavier elements of the novel, so while Patel is still easy to empathise with and cheer on as and when the story calls for it, there is perhaps a slightly uneven skewing of humour to drama. This, in turn, makes some beats of the film’s final act seem almost discordantly out of place.

Aneurin Barnard delivers a convincing enough performance as James Steerforth, David’s rich, frivolous friend with a dark side, but the writing doesn’t quite give his performance strong enough grounding to produce anything really substantive, and the trajectory of his character ends up feeling a little rushed and shoehorned in as a result. The script also underserves Rosalind Eleazar as Agnes Wickfield — she brings a refreshingly down-to-earth, straight-woman to the cast but is a little lost amidst the more ebullient characters, and her storyline feels undeveloped. The tonal imbalance also means the third act drags a little without the comical pyrotechnics of the first half to keep things progressing, with the more dramatic story beats perhaps a little belaboured. 

These are ultimately minor setbacks, however, as the film overall handles itself with such infectious and unbridled gusto that it’s nearly impossible to watch it and not have a good time. The audience I watched it with hardly stopped laughing for a moment, and the cast members are so clearly having the time of their lives on screen it’s easy to catch their buzz. It’s a film that crackles and fizzes as it goes along, bringing the audience with it for the ride. The Personal History of David Copperfield is as affectionate with its source material as it is irreverent, happy to pick and choose and edit what parts it pleases and do so to a largely marvellous effect.