‘Two Lovers’: One of the Best of 2009

Lots of filmmakers set out to make an evocative picture without concern for making an engaging one. Their motivation, I believe, is to do something out of the ordinary that will set them apart as artists. They see storytelling as a conventional skill, subject to, well, convention: Why bother with tension and release and plot? Anybody can do that. I, the artist, will evoke a mood. And that certainly can turn out okay, but most of the time it does not. Most of the time, it results in another volume for the ongoing arthouse library of self-indulgent twaddle.

Two Lovers is a splendid exception, both evoking a mood and telling a story. Not a complicated story, not a Jurassic Park story, and not even a Moody Family Drama story, but a story of familiar feelings in what for most us will be an unfamiliar setting populated by unfamiliar people. Two Lovers is mood-heavy account of a young man’s simultaneous romances with two women. Instead of ending up in bathos–the usual destination–the filmmakers show this young man carrying around his past while he tries to find a happy future. This conflict directs the nature and depth of the romances. In the end we see how happy endings are sometimes the saddest of all. (more…)