Love Is Strange

The title of this new movie from direc­tor Ira Sachs offers an extreme­ly banal obser­va­tion, per­haps hint­ing at an oblique sub­text which states that love is such an irre­ducibly illog­i­cal beast, that mak­ing pro­found state­ments about its earth­ly appli­ca­tion are futile. You could almost read it as a kind of free pass to get away with lots of irra­tional human behav­iour. Because hey, didn’t you hear? Love is strange. You can’t account for it. Jog on.

Alfred Molina’s George and John Lithgow’s Ben wake up, take a show­er, each put on a vin­tage three-piece suit and bolt down to their local reg­istry office in Man­hat­tan to be wed. After years of domes­tic com­pan­ion­ship, the knot is final­ly tied for all to see, though Ben’s Catholic school pay­mas­ters now have a major con­flict of inter­est shoved under their hyp­o­crit­i­cal noses.

Fired from his posi­tion as a music teacher and choir­mas­ter, the pair are forced apart until new, afford­able lodg­ings become avail­able. George heads to his now ex-neighbour’s sofa, a young gay cou­ple who like to par­ty hard and, with their police uni­forms (they are both cops), sly­ly ref­er­ence The Vil­lage Peo­ple. Ben, mean­while, accepts the strained hos­pi­tal­i­ty of his niece, Kate (Maris­sa Tomei), who doesn’t real­ly have the space or the patience to have him around.

Sachs’ film is con­tent to sit and watch as this try­ing sit­u­a­tion plays out, lean­ing back on the tru­ism that life is tough when you’re sep­a­rat­ed from your true love. One doesn’t like to pick apart plot points in seri­ous, pas­sion­ate movies such as this, but it’s hard to believe that these mature new­ly­weds would opt for such dras­tic mea­sures over, say, rent­ing a cheap hotel or opt­ing to move a lit­tle fur­ther out from the city cen­tre. Their estrange­ment sits awk­ward­ly as a dra­mat­ic con­struct which allows Sachs to study their behav­iour pat­terns while under the dark cloud of sul­len­ness, and even mortality.

The film bor­rows its set-up from Leo McCarey’s 1937 mas­ter­piece, Make Way for Tomor­row, in which an elder­ly het­ero­sex­u­al cou­ple under­go sim­i­lar lat­er-life indig­ni­ties due to finan­cial woes. Yet that film gained cred­i­bil­i­ty through his­tor­i­cal con­text and the real­i­sa­tion that these dod­dery char­ac­ters real­ly had nowhere else to go. Ben and George are world­ly types, and the pro­pos­al that their rela­tion­ship can be co-opt­ed as a bar­gain­ing chip for long-term hap­pi­ness rings bogus.

Sachs picks up on small details such as what it’s like being a loose-limb in a room where the dra­ma doesn’t involve you, and there’s an inter­est­ing and sub­tly erot­ic sub­plot exam­in­ing Ben’s efforts to paint a por­trait of a young boy who is close friends with Kate’s gawky son. Yet, as we see in the film’s lat­ter stages, the A‑material here is the rela­tion­ship between Ben and George, and all the best moments involve their hon­est, light­ly lovey-dovey inter­ac­tions. The counter-intu­itive plot of the film is about what it’s like when these char­ac­ters are apart. It’s a dra­mat­ic equa­tion that Sachs sad­ly doesn’t man­age to solve, but it’s bit­ter­sweet fun to watch all the the work­ing out he does along the way.