The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Dancin' Dan on an Oscar-winning romance.
Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? Not its more common sister, lust at first sight, but real, true, struck-by-cupid's-arrow L-O-V-E at first sight?
It is a rush. A breathless rush when everything around you seems to slow down and disappear until the only thing you can see, or even care about, is this other person. It will cloud your judgment, and perhaps impair your ability to speak, but all your senses become laser-focused on the object of your affections, this perfect being for whom you have fallen head over heels. More...
And the next day, when you think you've regained your composure, everything becomes heightened. You see things differently, hear things differently... you feel things differently.
One of the many things that make John Madden's Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love such a joy to watch again and again is how purely it captures that rush of falling in love. It's all over the eyes of Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare, in every longing, hungry glance at the Lady Viola de Lesseps. And it's in the voice of the luminous Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola, taking Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's lyrical words and making them immortal. None of this is more evident than in the scene where the two lovers first consummate their relationship, which is maybe a day after they met for the first time. They both know in their bones that they love each other, but Will cannot continue until he knows that they are not mistaken in their affections.
Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?
I am.
Then kiss me again for I am not mistook.
SWOON.
In a film full of perfect readings of perfect lines, this is the one that always comes to mind first when I think of Shakespeare in Love. The breathlessness of her voice, the need in her eyes, the light that emanates from her lovely face.... that is what it love feels and looks like.
And then, to complete the image, they undress each other and get down to where she has bound her breasts to disguise herself as a man in order to act in Shakespeare's new play (Viola: "I do not know how to undress a man" Will: "It is strange to me, too."). And so he undoes the binding.
Pure joy. She is becoming free of the bonds of family and society and experiencing a life she has only seen on stage or read in poems and books; fantasy made thrillingly real.
And in the morning, when her trusty nurse knocks on the door and wakes her up by telling her it is a new day?
It is a new world.
Yes. Yes it is. A most beautiful one.
P.S. Every lady deserves a maid as loving and devoted as Imelda Staunton in this film, don't you think?
What, you've never heard the sounds of great sex before, chambermaid? MOVE. ALONG.
and Happy Valentine’s Day !
Our Valentine's Series
A Room With a View (1986)
Before Sunset (2004)
The Painted Veil (2006)
Love Songs (2007)
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Beyond the Lights (2014)