"You're in pain and so am I:" heartbreak in the movies
Last week, I went through the very challenging experience of telling someone that I loved him, even though I knew he didn’t feel the same way. He very sweetly thanked me, confirmed that he didn’t return the feeling, and offered to talk sometime if I needed to. In that moment, I couldn’t entertain the thought; I stared at the floor as I spoke, asking him for some distance. I got it, and the next few days (ironically, spent in close proximity to him) were anguish.
By the end of the weekend, I felt desperate, lonely and hopeless. “What do I do?” I asked myself, over and over. Love is the most important thing in life. What happens to life when love goes away, or turns out never to have been there at all?
While in this state, I found myself remembering a performance given by Esther Garrel in Lover for a Day — a tender, slight, elegant movie I’d seen at Lincoln Center shortly after moving to New York City. I didn’t know it at the time, but the months that stood ahead of me on that mild February afternoon would themselves be filled with sadness, disillusionment. I was about to have my heart broken by the city itself, and to discover that my fantasy of New York was different from the drab, impersonal labyrinth to which I’d relocated.
In the film, Garrel plays a young woman named Jeanne, who has returned to her father’s apartment after being kicked out by her boyfriend. The father (Éric Caravaca) has his own strained relationship with Ariane (Louise Chevillotte), one of his students from the university where he teaches. But the film spends a great deal of time dwelling on Jeanne, allowing us to observe her as she grieves: weeping while sitting against a wall, cuddling in bed with her father’s girlfriend, and, eventually, attempting to throw herself from the apartment window.
Through it all, Garrel is disarmingly present — luminous in her bereavement, alternately self-aware and vacant. She cries real tears throughout the movie, an endless cascade that is all the more jarring for its narrative centrality. It’s weeping for weeping’s sake. Her face has remained in my mind for conveying perhaps the most eloquent expression of heartbreak I’ve ever seen on film.
It’s a performance that felt close to me five years ago, and it feels close to me now.
A day after my one-sided breakup, I wandered into my local library and picked out the DVD of Waiting to Exhale. In that film, Angela Bassett plays Bernie, a woman who abandoned her career to make a home, start a family, and serve as cheerleader to her husband, John (Michael Beach), as he built his own business. When John comes to tell her that he is leaving to live with a white woman colleague, Bernie throws a fit: she tears his jackets and shoes from their walk-in closet, screaming indignations as she recalls all the sacrifices she’d made for their life together.
She hurls his wardrobe into the backseat of his car, which she drives out of their garage. She douses the clothes with gasoline, and tosses a lit match through the car’s sunroof. Smoking a cigarette from afar, Bernie watches as her husband’s belongings erupt in flames — burning like a funeral pyre, giving vivid illustration to the fury that rages through her body.
Of course, I wasn’t going through Bernie’s degree of devastation, nor had I been betrayed as she had. But staring at Bassett’s face on the cover of the DVD, I smiled in understanding of her anger just the same.
Over the next few days, my mind carried me to various other women in the movies whose grief, though less explosive, registers like a frail, speckled fawn glimpsed in a field of tall grass, or in the dusty glow of a sunset. There’s Patricia Clarkson in The Station Agent, as Olivia, a scatterbrained eccentric who lives alone after the death of her young son, making art and stumbling over bumps in the ground like she can’t locate her equilibrium. Her home is by a lake, and when her friend, Fin (Peter Dinklage), who has feelings for her, comes by to offer his help, Olivia rages at him while the water flashes brilliantly behind her — like a blinding onslaught of joy misplaced, an overwhelming desire to revel in beauty once more.
“Go away!,” she screams. “I’m not your fucking girlfriend, or your mother. Alright? You’re not a child… leave me alone!”
There’s also Madeline Astor in The Maltese Falcon, as Brigid O’Shaughnessey, a criminal whose entire bearing is strained as if to stifle a massive, impending sob. She seduces, she kills, she longs for the private detective, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who’s working alongside her. At the end of the movie, he turns her in to the police, despite also feeling some of the love she holds for him. Spade tells her that he’s doing so because she’s dangerous; he’d never know when she might turn against him. But the reason Brigid is treacherous is because all she’s ever known is heartbreak. It is her belief in loss — as well as her violent fidelity to the duplicitous behavior she might call “self-preservation” — that dooms her.
Hers is a kind of grief that flourishes like a cancer: unseen, and relentless. The hard resentment on Astor’s face once Brigid realizes Spade’s plan is wrenching to behold: “You’ve been playing with me. Just pretending you cared, to trap me like this… You don’t love me!” Her cry of shock lingers in my memory even during the sunnier seasons of my life.
And then you have Anne Mayen in The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir’s masterful portrait of life in a countryside chateau on the eve of the Second World War. The movie functions as a roving series of glimpses into the motives behind dozens of guests who are staying at the house, as well as their servants. In the midst of this medley, Mayen plays Jackie, a sweet-tempered young woman who is studying pre-Columbian art. She is in love with the handsome aviator, André (Roland Toutain), who is guest of honor at the estate — even though she knows he’s in love with her married aunt, Christine (Nora Gregor).
During a hunt on the chateau’s grounds, Jackie and André separate from the rest of the group, and he gives her a playful kiss on the cheek. She asks him to do it again, which he does, before solemnly confessing: “You know, Jackie, I don’t love you.”
“I know,” she shrugs, “but you’re wasting your time on my aunt.”
He chuckles to himself, surprised that she knows where his affection lies. But Jackie admonishes him: “It’s no joke. You’re in pain and so am I.”
Rejection in love is a uniquely personal form of grief, because there are no outside forces which might be blamed for its occurrence. Death is inevitable, failure is imminent and malleable. To adore another person, only to find that they don’t adore you is a direct contradiction to the self. Humans have an innate need to be cared for, and to offer care; to be denied one’s own affection is an existential quandary that prompts us to question all meaning in our lives. Can I trust my emotions? Can I trust my sense of home, of belonging? How could I be so wrong about something that feels so right?
One of the things I’ve realized in the last week is that the miracle of love is its certainty. To be sure of love for another person — to be unhesitating in the willingness to rearrange and change aspects of one’s life in accommodation of love — is breathtakingly powerful. Indeed, rejection has the capacity to make this certainty all the more apparent: to love someone in spite of the fact that they don’t love you back might actually be the basis of a radical selflessness. To care about another person’s happiness, even if that means letting them go, is sacred.
At the end of Funny Girl, vaudevillian Fanny Brice (played by Barbra Streisand) steps onto a concert stage to perform for a vast audience. She’s just emerged from her dressing room, where her gambling-addict husband, Nicky (Omar Sharif, whose height and big brown eyes, I must admit, resemble those of the person who just turned me down), has paid her a visit after spending eighteen months in prison for embezzlement. They’ve both realized that their marriage cannot continue; they still love each other, but they need to separate and live their own lives.
They offer their final goodbyes, tears building as they sneak relieving glances at the floor. When Fanny goes to her spotlight, she gazes into the pitch black void that envelops her. She is alone, yet on display.
“Oh my man, I love him so… he’ll never know…”
She completes one rendition of the song’s chorus — tortured, bare, halting in sorrow — before the orchestra picks up and suddenly she’s belting out the chorus once more, this time with towering passion. She rises to a sustained, soaring note, then drops into a gutsy spit-up of lyrics (“What’s the diff-erence if I say I’ll go away…?”) while violins scramble to keep up.
All the while, Streisand throws around her hands and recedes in a black dress that is consumed by the theater’s darkness. She is alive in her grief, because she feels something. Certain of her love, she is certain of herself.
To love is to risk hurt. But the hurt is just another of life’s methods of bringing us closer to ourselves.
