Blue Valentine: Love rocks, then it's on the rocks

As Blue Valentine begins a small child searches for an ominously absent pet. It’s a smart method of alerting us to a more general suspicion that something’s missing in the lives of its central characters, the child’s parents Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Perpetually robed in paint-splattered pants and goofy animal sweaters, Dean’s an affectionate, playful father to little Frankie (Faith Wladyka), but he’s also childish and needy and starts drinking bright and early because apparently drinking doesn’t hamper his ability to paint houses. Cindy is by necessity more authoritative, probably the only one who makes sure Frankie eats reasonably well and gets to school in time. Cindy’s a nurse in a nearby clinic. A doctor there is eager to convince her to accept a transfer. Cindy’s procrastination in discussing the matter with Dean is, at the very least, conspicuous.

We then meet Dean and Cindy several years earlier, not long before they first met each other, when Dean worked for a Brooklyn moving company and Cindy studied medicine. A pattern is quickly established: for every scene that draws the younger Dean and Cindy closer together we’re given a counter-scene that shows the current Dean and Cindy moving farther apart. Blue Valentine, the sophomore feature from director Derek Cianfrance, written by Cianfrance with Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis, proposes to carve out a love story by contrasting the moment of its birth with that of its apparent death, replete with bad sex, screaming, and violence. There are many insightfully rendered fragments of this relationship scattered throughout the film, many extraordinarily frank, even touching moments of vulnerability between Gosling and Williams, often shot in tight close-ups that at once heighten a feeling of intimacy and mutual isolation, so I’ve been struggling to sort out why it is that the film ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. My best guess is that by focusing exclusively on either end of this story, by excising everything that happened in the middle, Blue Valentine neglects to give us a fully convincing sense of what this couple has shared, of the real hard work of marriage, of any sort of deeper connection between them besides the circumstantial. This manner of using only glimpses of a relationship’s progress to suggest something larger, complex and meaningful can work heartbreakingly well in, say, a song—given the working-class, east coast flavour, we might imagine Blue Valentine as a Bruce Springsteen song, or, given the film’s title, early Tom Waits—but as a feature film this love story feels a bit under-loved by its authors.

Much of what really works very well here occurs in the first half, including Cianfrnace’s imaginative use of instrumental versions of Grizzly Bear tunes. Dean’s conversations with his male coworkers at the moving company about how men and women fall in love possess a shaggy fraternal warmth that recalls similar scenes in David Gordon Green’s George Washington, particularly because of Dean’s somewhat overstated naïveté. Cindy’s more introverted and remote, yet the way we see her coasting through a mismatched relationship with a wrestler, caring for her grandmother, or ignoring the freaky outbursts of her father, a guy who’s got major problems with meatloaf, tells us something about her. As is so often the case in romantic love, Dean and Cindy’s convergence seems dependent on coincidence and impulsive decisions. Their courtship is basically a single impromptu date, incorporating a ukulele serenade and tap dancing, that’s very cute to watch unfold. They meet by chance, and by chance Cindy gets pregnant right around the same time. Feeling such longing for a woman he really doesn’t know yet, and having no clear ambitions to betray in any case, Dean hurls himself into becoming a husband and father, or at least the idea of it. Cindy’s reasons for being with Dean may be more practical, and fair enough, I guess. But I don’t think anyone whose ever given themselves to love-term love will recognize the foundations of something like that here. So do see the film for those sometimes vivid glimpses of passion and playfulness, for its most inspired floating moments of ecstasy or ache—just don’t expect it to all add up.

When we're all orphans: L'enfance nue on DVD

Maurice Pialat was already in his 40s when he embarked on his feature debut, but I like very much that he made it about what we used to call a “problem child.” I’ve read that Pialat was something of an overgrown problem child himself, tempestuous, demanding, and difficult to work with. L’enfance nue (1968) shows 10-year-old François (Michel Terrazon) being dismissed from one provincial foster home and shuttled off to another in the first 20 minutes, by which point we’ve already seen him throw a cat down several flights of stairs. Pialat was not himself a foster child, yet he repeatedly assured anyone who asked that L’enfance nue was a kind of self-portrait. Collaborators describe Pialat as having developed abandonment issues very early in life, feelings he could plausibly project upon François. But I wonder if when Pialat said L’enfance nue was about him he was actually referring to his adult self. This is a story about a shit disturber. It is also, incidentally, a truly remarkable, unnerving, yet also playful and affectionate movie by a filmmaker whose work most of us should probably know much more of.

I only really became aware of Pialat, who died in 2003, after being prompted to review Loulou (80) for Edmonton's Metro Cinema’s screening a few years back. It’s haunted me since, as a defiantly unresolved portrait of working class routines and erotic self-actualization, as a performance from Gerard Depardieu the likes I’ve which I’ve never seen, and as the closest thing in French cinema to a Bruce Springsteen song. I’d seen Pialat’s Van Gogh (91) when I was very young and recall being impressed by how little it catered to my notions of the eponymous artist’s persona or what bio-pics are supposed to do, by how immersed I became in its portrait of the milieux Van Gogh quietly slipped through. Unfortunately Pialat’s name vanished from my thoughts afterwards, probably because like so many of the most gifted post-New Wave filmmakers—Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel spring to mind as members of this group I’ve belatedly come to cherish—he failed to gain any significant foothold in North American movie culture. But we’re coming around. Criterion’s already released Pialat’s À nos amours (83) and is now offering L’enfance nue for our consideration, accompanied by some excellent supplements, like critic Kent Jones’ video essay and Pialat’s early short L’amour existe (60), which inspired François Truffaut to help produce L’enfance nue. (Pialat based François on a real kid with the same name, so apparently it's only a coincidence that the character shares the same Christian name as Truffaut, who less than a decade earlier made his debut with one of world cinema's defining movies about difficult childhood.)

L’enfance nue might have been a documentary, and the residue of this early conception remains in its opening images of a demonstration, but more pointedly in the camera’s dexterous responsiveness to the action. Most of the players are non-professionals, and several, most memorably Marie-Louise and Rene Thierry, who become François’ sexagenarian second foster parents, were essentially asked to tell their own stories within the boundaries of Pialat’s loose, often elliptical narrative framework. The approach imbues L’enfance nue with an unsentimental yet touching sense of the real. Terrazon however was not an actual foster child and this was probably a wise choice, given that it resulted in a central performance that never for one second comments on itself. We see François do both terrible and tender things and it’s more compelling that he barely seems cognizant of the difference. We see his face when others aren’t watching and he’s clearly listening to what’s going on around him, yet he doesn’t seem to listen with set expectations as to what response his actions will incite. We see François make discoveries—such as the Polaroid camera or Marie Marc’s wonderful, largely bedridden Nana’s mischievous sense of humour—and in these moments our internal scorecard of François’ positive or negative traits falls away while we observe him experience a moment fully. He’ll eventually experience a wedding, a death, and serious punishment for his deeds, and through it all Pialat’s knack for letting a scene breathe before abruptly moving on the next one invites us to simply take it in as we go. It’s only after the final fade-to-black that we can begin to comprehend just how much we’ve been through.