Team Experience is celebrating Valentines Day with favorite love scenes. Here's Jose...
Early on in my life I decided that all my favorite romances had to end with the lovers apart. And I mean, seriously, can you name a perfect romance that ends with happily ever after? From Casablanca to Dr. Zhivago and Roman Holiday, it's as if the movies have always told us that a brief, but powerful romance, the kind which makes us swoon in our 80s like Gloria Stuart in Titanic, is the kind of romance we all should crave. But it wasn't until I watched Andrew Haigh's Nottingham-set Weekend in 2011 that I realized as a gay man there was finally one of these romances for someone like me (I won't go into details of how this movie seems to me my biopic...) in which no one ended dead, as most gay romances do in fiction.
In the last scene we see Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New) together, they share a brief kiss as they say goodbye before Glen heads to America. Even though there is nothing really "tragic" about their farewell, it's this idea of the person existing in the same planet, as you have to find the will to move on, that's most devastating. I can see the lovers running into each other years in the future (I doubt they remained Facebook friends, I wouldn't have, would you?) and either of them going into full "of all the gin joints..." Bogie mode as they wonder "what if".
What are some of your favorite non-tragic gay romances? What romantic movie do you feel could be your biopic?