by Chris Feil
“You and me, you and me. Nobody baby but you and me...”
Ryan Gosling’s Dean breaks a makeout session and produces the romantic gesture lost to our time: a playlist burnt to a cd. It’s the ultimate young love gesture and met in kind with wide-eyed affection by the young woman its meant for, Michelle Williams’ Cindy. He’s chosen a song for them, in the tradition of all romances, one that will belong just to them. Before the soulful murmur of “You and Me” by Penny and the Quarters, Dean acknowledges the cliche of it as quickly as he shrugs it off. They will be different from all those other couples going honoring the ritual, he promises her. They will be special.
Blue Valentine charts the degradation of such romantic fantasies, showing us how painfully average their broken love will become, with music the embodiment of that fading vision of romance...
The film itself aches as deeply as it does because of how it respects these kind of early romantic moments rather than presenting them as warning signs. Director Derek Cianfrance allows for multiple pains to hit us at once rather than passing judgment on how they get lost in their intensifying feelings. We feel the spark of connection in the immediacy of the scenes of early scenes while the rawness of their troublesome future remains on the surface. It makes sense that their song sound so ghostly or from another era, as if the happy times still echo into the future until the day that they completely evaporate. Their song may not be anyone else’s, but that won’t mean it won’t fade away.
Much of the film’s musical identity is rooted in a sense of nostalgia, with Dean and Cindy’s definitive song anchoring it personally in a soulful sixties vibe of a hipster set. Elsewhere the passionate feeling of more familiar melodies like “We Belong” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (ever the recurring cinema classic) continue that feeling of the film belonging to the past while Cianfrance presents them antithetically to the onscreen marriage. In Dean and Cindy’s present, the emotion of such music occurring only serves to underscore how far away such swoony sentiment is from their reality.
But back in their past, a most precious musical memory brings together their former blossoming love and crumbling future in one flurry of spontaneity and a timeless song. Urging Cindy to dance, Dean croaks out an Elvis standard, “You Always Hurt the One You Love”. It’s an omen but a moment of movie magic that captures them both in a pure state of affectionately-bared defenses, one that defines the depth of feeling encapsulated in the intimate breadth of the film for us in the audience. Time kind of stops in this scene and you just feel the whole movie.
And still, thanks to all the blinders of youth or new love, they still can’t see that this should be their song. This was the song that would define them, the promise that they would ultimately bring eachother more pain than beauty.
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