Ironically, it is George and Ben’s marriage, a joyous occasion presented without cloying artifice, that first throws a spanner in the works.
As those who patiently offer them floor-space wrestle with their own personal issues (fraught parenting, adolescent isolation, marital tension, professional frustration), our two lovers wish only to be back together in each other’s arms, in their own home. There’s a similar sense of displacement in Love Is Strange, in which Manhattanites Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are forced to shack up in separate households after losing the New York apartment in which they have shared a happy and fulfilling life. Watching this quietly beguiling tale of an ageing gay couple who have been together for decades, I was reminded not only of the films of Yasujirô Ozu, Woody Allen and Maurice Pialat (the declared touchstones of director Ira Sachs and his co-writer, Mauricio Zacharias), but also of Sam Mendes’s underappreciated Away We Go, in which parents-to-be John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph visit their variously fractured friends and relations, discovering en route that the only certainty in life is each other. Rarer is the movie that has at its heart a stable relationship, in which the world itself may be out of sorts but the lovers themselves are constant.
F or obvious reasons, films about love often focus either on the first flush of passion or the dying embers of tenderness and toleration.
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