Valentine's - Gone Girl
Monday, February 13, 2017 at 2:55PM Team Experience is celebrating Valentines Day with favorite love scenes. Here's Chris...
Let’s not allow the roses of Valentine’s Day to let some thorny romances go unnoticed. For all its shocks and grisly goings-on, Gone Girl is still something of a morbid romance - if you can get past the extremity (ya know, like murder) to see its proposition that successful relationships require big compromise. And also that a relationship can’t expect to keep up its picturesque beginnings.
Take Amy and Nick’s rose-colored glasses moment: in a literal haze of sweetness, the two exchange a kiss, Nick grazing her lips in a distinctive cool move. It’s a sexy and definitive moment, one that defines what their love will forever chase when things get much more difficult.
The memory of the confectionary kiss is almost too good to be true, certainly at least too “perfect” to maintain. When Amy sees Nick recreate this with his mistress, it isn’t just a betrayal of fidelity but of the veneer they had created together, a moment she thought was theirs alone. She recounts this (a version, at least) to Lola Kirk’s shifty confidant with such reverence as to reveal more of Amy’s storytelling abilities, but a true genuine love for Nick as well. Amy’s sociopathy means she plays with a different language in expressing her affection, one that requires mining through terrible deeds to understand but is there all the same. Interpret Nick’s decision to stay together as you must, but their twisted game isn’t without actual love.
What's your favorite twisted love story?
Reader Comments (22)
In the movies: Obsession, New York, New York, Wuthering Heights, The Crying Game, Dracula, Sweeney Todd, Boxing Helena, The Apartment, Lolita, Jezebel, Sunset Blvd, Vertigo, The Hunger, Gilda...
Great post - and genius list, Paul!
I might also add "Dangerous Liaisons."
And "Wuthering Heights" is hella twisted, yes, but so is "Jane Eyre" (in a way that tends to get downplayed in the film versions, to make Mr. Rochester more conventionally desirable.)
I bloody love this film. I *am* Rosamund Pike in this movie and all the clown men I've dated are Ben Affleck.
Absolutely Sunset Boulevaard!! Good call on that one Paul Outlaw!
I would add HEATHERS to the list!... Winona Ryder at the end standing there watching Christian Slater off himself while she smokes just warms my coal-black heart :-)
Notes on a Scandal
Birth
Breaking the waves
The Virgin Suicides
Mulholland Drive
War of the Roses is an unsung classic in the dark & twisted love story genre. It's also funny as hell.
Also:
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
King Kong
Wolf
Only Lovers Left Alive
The Painted Veil
Bound
Free Fall
21 Grams
War of the Roses
Basic Instinct
Single White Female
The end of the affair
Atonement
Dangerous Liaisons
Her
Blue is the Warmest Color
The Apartment
Bridges of Madison County
Age of Inocence
Vertigo
I thought the guys in Happy Together were pretty effed up. Sid & Nancy had some serious issues duh. And I kind of remember the love being pretty messed up in Leave Her to Heaven.
I'm ashamed I omitted Leave Her to Heaven and Her...
I love a good "twisted (or tragic) love story" and Valentine's Day is the perfect time to watch a few. I usually end up having somewhat of a "F*ck Love Movie Marathon" and Gone Girl is definitely a favorite for the occasion. A lot of what I end up watching tends to fall more into the horror genre: Antichrist, Honeymoon, Don't Look Now, Possession, Dead Ringers, The Brood, and now Crimson Peak.
Others I'd suggest:
- In the Realm of the Senses
- Moebius
- Vertigo
- Obsession
- Senso
- Deep End
- The War of the Roses
- Closer
- The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
- Fox and His Friends (just recently saw this for the first time OMG)
- Wild at Heart
- The Night Porter
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
So, my version of "twisted" seems to basically just mean totally f*cked up. lol
But wait, there's more:
- In a Lonely Place
- Rebecca (how did I forget that one?)
- Body Heat
- By the Sea (yes, I liked it)
- Crimes of Passion
- Last Year at Marienbad
- Leaving Las Vegas
- Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
- That Cold Day in the Park
- Tom at the Farm
- Badlands
- Woman in the Dunes
- Beauty & the Beast (Cocteau, but the story is f*cked up in any version)
Claudia Cardinale and Jean Sorel in Visconti's 'Sandra'!
The Crying Game
The Piano Teacher
The Piano
Cronenberg's Crash
One of my favourite twisted love stories is My Man Godfrey in the great decade for comedies - the 1930's - where with the economic crisis the message to the audiences was something like: "You don't have money, but that doesn't matter if you have people who love you - look at these millionaires, they are unhappy and idiotic with all this money." The cast is wonderful with William Powell playing a comedy more sophisticated than Cary Grant - what sounds impossible. And the gorgeous gorgeous Carole Lombard anticipates the crazy blonde of Marilyn Monroe in the 1950's - instead of Jean Harlow like the majority thinks. The movie follows the overexploited woman-hunts-man idea like Bringing up Baby and The Lady Eve among others and again the woman wins! Brilliant.
Surprised no one's mentioned my all-time favorite movie, "Gun Crazy". Peggy Cummins and John Dall made a memorable pair of lovers - destructive, self-destructive, the last word in l'amour fou. I also have lasting memories of an infinitely obsessive Isabella Adjani in "The Story of Adele H" and of the fever pitch chemistry whipped up between Jeanne Moreau and Ettore Manni at the climax of Tony Richardson's. "Mademoiselle". Thoroughly applaud previous mentions of "Lolita", "Obsession" and certainly "Leave Her to Heaven". Am I a bad person because I always find myself on board with Gene Tierney's motivations in that one?
Ettore Scola's Passione d'Amore. The impossible, magnetic attraction between a beautiful young soldier and a deeply unattractive, howling, passionate woman.
Also, Scarlett and Rhett.
And Jules et Jim, The Night Porter, La ley del deseo, Rust and Bone, Laura, Dead Again, The Palm Beach Story, Ben-Hur (1959)...
More twisted love stories:
THE woman of the year. Katharine Hepburn playing a feminist before the feminism while Spencer Tracy simply watches her passionately.
RANDOM harvest. Greer Garson and Ronald Colman in incredible plot twists that prove that soap operas are daughters of old movie melodramas.
BUS stop. I know a lot of people can't stand this movie but that's a Marilyn Monroe and the love here is the definition of twisted.
THAT touch of mink. Every romantic comedy with Doris Day or most or them are twisted,
but this has Cary Grant, who - some say - didn't like the film. He was wrong. It's very good. Silly, but very good.
.
God I LOVE this film
Rosamund Pike should have won the Oscar. Period.
Twisted love: The Piano Teacher, Dangerous Liaisons, and Silver Linings Playbook