How do I love thee?

Let me count the (11) ways … or in the movies, anyway

Gin-swilling riverboat pilot Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and straight-laced missionary Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) discover an affinity for each other in John Huston’s The African Queen.
Gin-swilling riverboat pilot Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and straight-laced missionary Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) discover an affinity for each other in John Huston’s The African Queen.

Love is a many-splendored thing, as we've been told since the 1955 William Holden vehicle, but that doesn't mean every phase is without its pitfalls.

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The love affair between 80-yearold Maude (Ruth Gordon) and 19-year-old Harold (Bud Cort) is mapped in Hal Ashby’s weirdly sweet Harold and Maude from 1971.

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Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) gets caught up in the web of deceit that surrounds Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) in Roman Polanski’s noir classic Chinatown.

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Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) and Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) wonder what’s next after he disrupts her wedding at the end of Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate.

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After 17 years of marriage, Barbara (Kathleen Turner) and Oliver Rose (Michael Douglas) find they can’t stand each other in the 1989 film The War of the Roses.

Hollywood has used romance and love as its main narrative driver for so long, it's more odd when you catch a film that doesn't use it as a device for its protagonist, either as the search for the elusive right person, the protection of said person, or the maintaining of the relationship with said person under adverse circumstances. Move slightly away from Hollywood studios, and a whole new world opens up: Relationships falter and wither, loved ones leave and do not return, love is not reciprocated to devastating result.

The way we see it, you can find roughly 11 stages represented in film (but whom are we kidding? There are probably several thousand; we're limiting it to 11 because we want to make this a finite piece if you don't mind), ranging from rapt devotion to abject disgust. Allow us to define them for you, and pepper in examples of them at work, listed from most cynical to most virtuous.

11.We Want Each Other Dead

Perhaps, a long time ago, the relationship was pure and sweet, but things have changed over the years, turning dank and fallow, and now the couple absolutely can't stand one another to the point where they actively seek out their partner's demise. This is a staple of a lot of film noir -- the dame who wants the new man to kill her husband so she can be free and they can wallow in the insurance money -- but outside of the shady pools of shadow circuit, you rarely see something this extreme in a mainstream film unless, of course, as with films such as Mr. & Mrs. Smith and I Love You to Death, it's pretty much a comic setup to reunite the couple in the end after testing the limits of their distaste.

Best exemplified by: The doomed husband and wife (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner) in War of the Roses, dying on the ground inches away from each other, raising their shaking hands toward each other only to shoo them away in order to die alone.

Other examples: Blood Simple, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Married Life

10.We Tried, I Just Don't Love You Anymore

If the truest form of romantic disdain isn't hate, it's disinterest, that does not preclude couples from caring for each other, even as it becomes painfully obvious that at least one of them has fallen deeply out of love with their partner. These tend to be some of the most emotionally wrenching of any films you may choose to watch. There are no villains, exactly, and there are certainly no winners, just a lot of pain, suffering and human agony displayed for the world to witness and recoil.

Best exemplified by: The torturous last scene from Blue Valentine, in which the couple -- memorably played by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams -- finally walk away from each other, leaving their young child chasing after her retreating father. You will likely only watch this movie once, but it will stick with you forever.

Other examples: Scenes From a Marriage, Her, Burn After Reading, Citizen Kane, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Knife in the Water

9.I Love You to Death and We're All Doomed

Kind of the flipside of No. 10: Someone is so deeply in love (and perhaps unhinged) that the conflation of love and death somehow merges into one tragic ideal, and/or, one partner in the tryst sees death as the only real way out of the pain and suffering the romance has brought to them. The films that come out of this trope tend toward the dreamy and art-house set, but can also veer into other territory, as in France, or even, in extreme examples, the madcap violence of teen killers.

Best exemplified by: the obsessed Japanese woman, covered in her lover's blood, writhing on the floor next to his prone body in Nagisa Oshima's notorious 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses.

Other examples: Sunrise, Betty Blue, Bonnie and Clyde, Code 46, Donnie Darko, Like Water for Chocolate

8.I Do Love You, but I Clearly Didn't Understand

You meet someone, you fall in love, but somehow things start not adding up with them, and you realize they are harboring some sort of terrible secret that they're not explaining to you. Maybe it's a seriously tragic past, being terrorized by a gas-sucking creep, or the fact that you often turn into a panther. Whatever the reason, this romance is pretty much doomed to fail due to these complications.

Best exemplified by: a stunned Jake Gittes at the climax of Chinatown, watching as the love of his life is forced to drive away with her brutish, abusive father while nothing he can do can stop them.

Other examples: Cat People, Blue Velvet, Spider-Man, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Jane Eyre, The Fly, Vertigo

7.I Love You but You Don't Remember Me

A rare but notable category, which typically produces fascinating films (the coming Complete Unknown, maybe not quite so much), it features a protagonist who is absolutely convinced they intimately know someone else as a former lover, but the person in question insists they've never met. In Alain Resnais' brilliant Last Year at Marienbad, we hear a man in voice-over trying to convince an unseen, unheard young woman that they had been lovers at this exquisite hotel before, overlaid with imagery of the now empty hotel, the camera hypnotically trailing down the ornate hallways and outside to the fountain. You can expect such languid, beguiling dreamscapes over here.

Best exemplified by: the trancelike ending of Marienbad, in which no questions are definitively answered, and no conclusion has been reached.

Other examples: Certified Copy, Sunday, Complete Unknown

6.I Thought I Loved You Plenty but Now What?

One of the great endings to a romantic movie in cinematic history: In The Graduate, just after Dustin Hoffman's Ben has rescued his lady love, Elaine (Katharine Ross), from the nuptial clutches of the "make-out king" her mother has wedged between them, the two run giddily away from the church where Elaine's wedding was taking place, board a bus, sit down to catch their breath, and quite possibly begin to realize they have absolutely no idea what they've done, or how their lives might work together. After the exhilarating ride of watching Ben finally taking positive action on his account, we see the downside of his actually making a choice and having to live with it. Notably, the film ends on a shot of their bus speeding away in the distance, the camera no longer even bothering to follow them into the abyss.

Best exemplified by: the two lovers, one still in her wedding dress, sitting on the seat in the bus, their happy expressions slowly being drained back into vacant stares.

Other examples: Save the Last Waltz

5.I Have Gone to Great Lengths Over Here

One of the more popular sub-genres, as it involves besotted lovers going through a brutal slog of tribulations in order to unite (or reunite) with the objects of their affection. It makes for equally prime dramatic fodder in action-related love stories (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; The Princess Bride) and stagey dramas (Cold Mountain, Dracula, which offers up Keanu Reeves' absolutely astounding British accent). Watching our hero overcome the massive odds against them in the name of their love is inspiring and usually deeply satisfying.

Best exemplified by: the fallen angel (Bruno Ganz) of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, who agrees to become human in order to be with a young woman (Solveig Dommartin) he adores.

Other examples: The Last of the Mohicans, Moonrise Kingdom, Brazil, Twilight, The Notebook

4.Even the Strangest, Most Difficult People Find Love in the End

Hollywood loves trotting out some irascible iconoclast who denies love's potency, only to have them felled by their own emotion like a sapling in a hurricane. Part of the fascination of watching these sorts of people find someone is the suggestion that all of us do in fact have someone out there, waiting patiently for us to show up. It makes for riveting and wildly off-beat stuff. Of course, when it goes wrong -- as in the execrable As Good as It Gets or Wedding Crashers, to name but two -- it's usually because it's given us such a hatefully unaware protagonist, they don't deserve happiness in the first place.

Best exemplified by: the night spent together by a 19-year-old man (Bud Cort) and his 80-year-old beloved (Ruth Gordon) in Harold and Maude, as romantic and endearing as it is peculiar.

Other examples: The Piano, Punch Drunk Love, Greenberg, Married to the Mob, The Honeymoon Killers, The Bridges of Madison County, Lost in Translation

3.I Love You, but Spent the Entire Movie Denying It

One of my personal favorites, and also a common device in much of Jane Austen and other like-minded 18th-century British novelists, it demands protagonists so incredibly repressed emotionally that they can't or won't let themselves acknowledge how madly they are in love with someone else, even if it's pretty plain for everyone else to see. The payoff comes at the end, of course, when they are finally forced to confront their feelings. I have to admit this is one romantic movie trope that works on me like a charm. I blame my British father.

Best exemplified by: the heroine (Helena Bonham Carter) in A Room With a View, finally admitting the love she has been utterly suppressing for a dashing young student (Julian Sands) by incredulously declaring, "But of course I do [love him]: What did you all think?"

Other examples: Clueless, Sense and Sensibility, Secretary, The Age of Innocence

2.You Are Totally Different From Me, Ergo I Must Love You

One of Hollywood's most exploited tropes: Incredibly unlikely people fall in love despite their obvious differences. As a bonus, the love tends to bloom late and only after the characters spend most of their time despising one another. Another favorite offshoot is the pair of characters that initially seem totally different but, in fact, have far more in common than we might have first thought.

Best exemplified by: Charlie (Humphrey Bogart), the grungy, gruff captain, and Rose (Katharine Hepburn), the prim, fastidious missionary, in John Huston's The African Queen.

Other examples: Jane Eyre, All That Heaven Allows, King Kong, Notting Hill, Pretty in Pink, Beauty and the Beast, Say Anything ..., Crazy/Beautiful

1.I Will Make a Noble Sacrifice

The highest form of cinematic love: A protagonist loves another so much, he's willing to lay down his life for his beloved. Easily the best-known example of recent years is James Cameron's mammoth hit Titanic (even though it's now been, er, proven via the Internet that Rose actually contributes mightily to Jack's death -- look it up!) and who of us can forget the calm grace with which Leonardo DiCaprio's body finally resigns and sinks into the frigid depths of the Atlantic? More effectively, in a much better film, the last harrowing scenes of The English Patient hit me directly in the tear ducts. Another twist to the sub-genre is the reformed cad who turns out to be far nobler than even they might have guessed.

Best exemplified by: the unexpectedly magnanimous death of Vicomte de Valmont after a duel, in which he sets in motion the exoneration of the only woman he has ever truly loved more than himself in Stephen Frears' adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons.

Other examples: Leon the Professional, Mona Lisa, Tangled, The Crying Game, Casablanca

MovieStyle on 05/20/2016

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