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Gina Kim ’s Never Forever
Things We Do For Love “The trend now is that you can control your body; you can control your diet; you can control your destiny—the Oprah Winfreyization of America. They’re trying to empower us with all this jargon, but when it comes to love, we all know it can be really uncontrollable,” remarked Sundance Director of Programming John Cooper. “I think the filmmakers see it in themselves, and that’s why it’s a fascinating subject. When you have characters that do go for it, they make for interesting characters. They’re interesting and fun to watch. So they make for a successful movie. We like these people.”
At first glance, the subject of Dan Klores’s documentary, Crazy Love, Burt Pugach and Linda Riss’s relationship, seems wholesome enough. It is 1950s in The Bronx. He’s successful. She’s pretty. Burt woos the much younger Linda with plane rides, nightclub dates, and promises of the finer things in life. But when Linda discovers that Burt is a philandering, ladies’ man with a wife and kids, she breaks off the relationship. It is at this point that the true meaning of the title comes into play. Burt’s definition of love quickly sinks into obsession, and Linda becomes a worst-case scenario stalker victim, with her story splashed across the New York tabloids. “Obsession is what initially attracted Burt to Linda. What are love and obsession, and what’s the fine line between the two?” asked Klores. “If we’re all honest with ourselves we’ve all had relationships where we’ve become obsessed. As a 60-year-old man whose had a lot of relationships, I know I have.” Decades later, the unthinkable occurs; Linda not only forgives Burt, she takes him back. In their twilight years, theirs appears to be a love affair anew—one that may make you want to scream at the screen. “I was trying to examine what psychological magnets brought these two people together. Why would she make this decision?” said Klores. “We’re all significantly shaped by our upbringing and our parents. Burt’s mother tells him repeatedly, ‘you’re no good’, but I don’t make excuses for Burt. What he did was hideous, criminal, and sick.” The foreshadowing role of parents is hard to escape when love is on the line. In his feature Adrift In Manhattan director Alfredo de Villa examines what happens when you connect three strangers and their pathologies: a grieving mother (Heather Graham), an isolated teen confused by his mother’s sensuality (Victor Rasuk), and an elderly painter (Dominic Chianese) losing his eyesight who is haunted by his father. According to deVilla, Adrift is about what people do to avoid that true opposite of love—loneliness. “The only solution to isolation is kinship; that’s what keeps you alive; that’s what matters,” he explained. “Being together, that’s what these characters do in spite of each other. They’re all in their personal quests through machinations of the movie, and they come together only for a brief period of time.” Loneliness also infects the thirty-something heroine of Zoe Cassavetes’s Broken English. The routine-ruled, panic-attack-stricken Nora (Parker Posey) so desperately wants love that she does something completely out character; she embarks on a spontaneous transatlantic voyage to Paris in search of a mysterious Frenchman she had a casual affair with in New York. “I think it feels so painful to be alone and think you are never going to find ‘real love,’” explained Cassavetes, daughter of actress Gena Rowlands and indie icon John Cassavetes. “I don't think of Broken English as a traditional romantic comedy. It's more of a story of self-exploration. It's brave to really look at yourself and take chances based on what is going to make you happy in life, but that mission can't rest on other people's perceptions of you. ” As much as our quest for love may be internal, other people are inevitably involved. Sometimes even the desire to preserve the most perfect, homespun love can lead us down the most winding, adulterous, lustful roads imaginable. “My film follows the classic plotline of any melodramatic love story, but at the heart, my message is very simple,” said Gina Kim of her third feature film Never Forever. “You can only find your true self through your bodily desires, and it’s only through love that you find your true self. It sounds corny but it’s true.” Never Forever introduces us to the cosmopolitan, interracial, childless coupling of American Sophie and her Korean husband Andrew. The two desperately want a baby to complete their picture perfect marriage, but when it is revealed that Andrew is the problem, Sophie creates the solution with her body and that of an Asian stranger who she propositions at a fertility clinic. In the process of fulfilling their dream, she cataclysmically alters her and Andrew’s life. Commitment and the rhythmic, cyclic way love enters and exits our lives provide some of the most engaging allegories in film. In The Good Life, an odd-looking Nebraskan teen (Mark Webber) appears to be shackled by his endless responsibilities and routines in his small hometown. But the presence of an enigmatic, eerily familiar newcomer (Zooey Deschanel) forces him to reexamine his life. “It’s about his love for an old man, his love for family, his brief love he finds in this girl, and his responsibility to all those people,” said director/screenwriter Steve Berra, who enjoys a successful dual career as a pro skateboarder. For Berra the story is equal parts love and self-discovery. “It’s about doing the right thing even if you don’t want to, but knowing you’d feel worse if you did the wrong thing.”
The dark, nasty heart of love, as well as the soaring, light beauty of it, often revolves around what we are willing to do. In Snow Angels, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckingsale play a recently separated husband and wife navigating the shaky, potholed filled road of child rearing in their small town, until they pay the ultimate price when faced with the loss of their young daughter. The film “intertwines intimate exposed moments of love and loss,” director/screenwriter David Gordon Green explained. “Through loss we get a perspective of things. Either you feel the wound or you don’t, but you put it all into a digestible perspective of what you need in your life. Sometimes in my own selfish world I haven’t always realized all the amazing things I had until they were gone.” International filmmakers at the Festival this year have also made bold, unusual, and gripping choices to recreate conventional stories about what people all over the world do for love. In the Eagle v. Shark, director and screenwriter Taika Waititi uses the lush backdrop of New Zealand for his sweet, whimsical tale of how two quirky misfits find love. Director Kim Tai-sik takes a tragicomic approach in his South Korean World Cinema Competition, Driving With My Wife’s Lover, which as the title suggests chronicles a husband’s self-imposed bonding expedition he takes with his wife’s lover. In Mexican-born director Jorge Hernandez Aldana’s The Night Buffalo, his schizophrenic protagonist hatches a startling and ultimate plan of revenge when betrayed by his best friend and girlfriend. “In love, people do all sorts of crazy things,” observed producer Andrew Fierberg whose movie credits include the twisted Secretary and Yes, as well this year’s Festival entries Broken English and Never Forever. “It is in those emotions that a twist takes place in storytelling conceits. It is a place where everything and anything might happen.” Which is probably why we all continue to need, want, and watch films about that crazy little thing called love. |
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