February 2025: LOVE ON THE ROCKS
Ah, love. If movies are communally experienced dreams, then filmmakers must perpetually be in search of dream-worlds to explore, and what do people dream of more frequently and more fervently than romance? But there’s a critically important difference between love stories and being in love, and that’s the “story” part. Stories require dramatic arcs. Stories demand conflict. And stories, at least satisfying ones, must be delimited, quantized – books have covers, movies have credits, and curtains have to close some time.
Love, to state the obvious, isn’t like that. Stories are frozen moments of fixed duration; in the real world, you might have your meet-cute or your traumatic breakup, but the sun still rises the next day. So what’s the story of that next day? Or ten years later? What’s the story of the day before? Some brave filmmakers have tried to map out the territory around the edges of the standard romance, or tell a non-standard romance in the first place. Those attempts can be an acquired taste if you’re used to the standard – as it happens, hearts pierced and transfixed by arrows make lovely cartoons but grisly medical histories. But through the grief or misery or annihilatory obsession, those non-standard stories can reveal new textures and resonances with viewers’ ideas about love that get overwhelmed by the mass of bog-standard, regular stuff.
Here at Big Picture, we’re all about uncovering the unusual. And so for our second block of themed movies, we present Love on the Rocks: a selection of films about love turned bad, love turned weird, something else turned into love, or love turned into something else. We hope you’ll find that these movies grouped together reveal novel connections between themselves: In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai’s gorgeous, dangerously tense story of yearning, regret and alienation; Moonstruck, a perfect comedic exploration of destiny in love, like When Harry Met Sally staged inside a Bed-Stuy boxing ring; Double Indemnity, a classic of film noir about two people each using the trappings of love and romance to get what they really want; and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma’s incredibly moving tale of a doomed, impossible, seemingly perfect love. Happy St. Valentine’s day. Might want to get some fresh gauze on that arrow wound.
VIEW the Big Picture Archive to see all previous themes and all currently scheduled Big Picture films.
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000)
1h 38m / PG / Drama, Romance
Journalist and aspiring writer Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary at a shipping company, both rent rooms in the same apartment building in Hong Kong. Both have spouses that work unusual hours, and both find as the weeks pass that they prefer the company and friendship of each other over being isolated and alone. But then they gradually realize that both of their spouses are being unfaithful – with each other. And try as they might to deal with their crumbling marriages in a manner consistent with their own beliefs, they both find themselves irresistibly attracted to each other.
In the Mood for Love, director Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece of mournful love in a career full of masterpieces (Chungking Express, Happy Together, Fallen Angels), has a well-deserved reputation for its stylistic visuals and flawless fashion aesthetic. But its honest and sympathetic portrayal of two fully-realized human beings in the midst of a life-shattering experience are what elevate it to the ranks of all-time great cinema.
MOONSTRUCK (1987)
1h 42m / PG / Drama, Romance
Directed by Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof) and written by John Patrick Shanley (Doubt: A Parable), Moonstruck is the loud, tempestuous, hilarious story of Loretta Castorini, a tragically young widow living with her parents in Brooklyn Heights. After her boyfriend Johnny proposes marriage, he asks her to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to the wedding while he’s in Sicily taking care of his dying mother. Ronny, it turns out, holds a grudge; he cut his hand off in a bread slicer, while distracted and talking to Johnny, and the injury caused his own fiancée to leave him. But there’s something special about Ronny, something Loretta can’t get out of her head …
American treasure Cher hasn’t done a lot of acting over the course of her career – she’s made a lot of movies for a regular person, but not very many for one of the most famous women of the 20th century. But the acting she did, she nailed: Moonstruck, Mermaids and The Witches of Eastwick are all stone-cold classics, and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Mask are both fascinating relics (if a bit challenging in perspective nowadays). But this is the one that won her an Oscar for Best Actress, and she deserves every ounce of that gold statue.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944)
1h 47m / NR (PG-13 equivalent) / Drama, Crime, Mystery
Insurance account representative Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray, the dad from My Three Sons, and we dare you to find a more incredible string of words to introduce a romantic lead) walks into the home of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwick) in order to try and upsell her husband additional car coverage. But Phyllis, flirting openly with Walter, subtly turns the conversation towards life insurance. Can you get a policy on someone without their knowledge? Well, Walter’s no wet-behind-the-ears rube! He’s realized she’s trying to off her husband and get away with the money. But wouldn’t you know it, he’s already in love with her. And so he sets about helping her plan the killing of her husband, jeopardizing his own life and career in the process.
The thing you have to know, if you’re new to film noir, is that all of these people are just awful. This frequently gets lost in the discussion; the actors are so brilliant, and the plots so thrilling, that it’s easy to forget that you’re watching (in this case) a murder conspiracy being conducted by a sleazy salesman and a manipulative serial cheater. But despite everyone being terrible (you’re supposed to be rooting for a misanthropic grump played by Edward G. Robinson who loves nothing more than denying insurance claims, a tough sell in 2025), the film itself is gritty, filthy perfection. Its magnetism is undeniable. And in the dark, magnetism can pass for love.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019)
2h 2m / R / Drama, Romance
Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has been commissioned to travel to a small island off the Brittany Coast and paint a portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young noblewoman who is engaged to be married to a Milanese aristocrat. This marriage is against Héloïse’s will, and she has therefore refused to sit for any portraits; the commission has been made by her mother, the Countess, and Marianne must conduct her work in secret, pretending merely to be Héloïse’s companion and lady’s maid.
Watching her by day and painting her by night, Marianne feelings for Héloïse grow – until they become something entirely new. When their mutual attraction is revealed, and their intimacy shifts, Héloïse is inflamed with the experience of something like freedom for the first time in her life. But that’s the thing about fire: what is burned is transformed but also consumed. What will remain?