Review: Blue Valentine

If there is an archetype for romance on American screens, Derek Cianfrance in his new film Blue Valentine successfully break it.  It comes across as such effortless style that one will only be rendered speechless.

The plot revolves around a married couple coming to terms with their lack of compatibility and a possible separation. The plot travels from the present to the past, the times where they met and took and began their eventual relationship. The beauty lies in the performance of every single actor. Ryan Gosling as the husband fulfills his oblivion via his childlike inhibitions. His character embodies the true capital abstraction. The America that has his dreams designed into a life that he now lives, and his individual sensibilities that knows nothing more than to love his wife and their child. A conversation with his wife Cindy ( Michelle Williams), takes us back to the notions of love that we have been promised for decades from the screen we look in to. He asks, “what potential, potential to be what? what more than being your husband and being Frankie’s father?” His oblivion to his wife’s silent tumult is truly the raw quality that makes the film stand out from the genre it promises.

Williams as the only complexity this film articulates is remarkable. Not only is the grammar of her brokenness beautifully internalized, but rather she partakes the drawing out the chaos in their companionship. There is nothing that leaves the viewer comfortable as the story unravels, the lines of a difficult life that these characters inhabit.

The camera captures side profiles, and extreme close ups of the conversations the two are having as a married couple. The jerkiness of the shots are played out by these characters in their side profiles , might not be anything new, but makes quite a statement with its filling the frame with excessive conversations , that are important and yet posed as ordinary. The discomfort felt by the couple in having these conversations and their mixed up feelings makes for the tone of the film. The retro blue, as seen largely on screen, and the strange circumstances the two continue to inhabit through their past proximity and the present distanciation that is doomed to occur, create the space for so much possibilities.

At the end, one does feel the stark remorse as the two figure out their ordeal, as one is reminded of the noiresque sensibility of the film. This sense of dystopia is also challenged in the film, when little Frankie, played by the ease and comfort of Faith Wlaydka , as the child of the couple who is the source of happiness and innocence for the film and the characters as well. The intimacy of all these characters show a great sense of maturity in the writing of Diane Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne .

The film purports itself as the epic narrative of two people, which it does fulfill with all its charms. One cannot miss such fresh possibility of this director, who is moving with the epic quality of the film too.