Blue Valentine
The last shall be first? It hoped for ripping small independent film “Blue Valentine”, which in an ideal world, would feel at the next Academy Awards. Only for performance glaring truth of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are noteworthy.
A couple breaks up. This is not the first and certainly not the last. What was so nice to start gradually falls into disrepair, and despite their good intentions, or Dean (Ryan Gosling) or Cindy (Michelle Williams) seem to find a way to remedy the situation. At the center of this warm paradise became icy battlefield is their young daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka) who does not want to be separated from both parents.
The ups and downs of love, the film deals since its inception, always trying to infuse a bit of novelty to this theme as old as the world. A few years ago the French filmmaker François Ozon, through its unequal “5 X 2″, had the originality to describe a union beginning with the end of his failure at birth. A bit less adventurous in form, the director Derek Ciafrance multiplied by ellipses, comparing two very different worlds: the past far from idyllic makes the heart beat and now much less inclined to happiness.
What emerges is an honest and accurate analysis of the couple, as did Sam Mendes few years ago with his underrated “Revolutionary Road”. The director dissects the foundations of attachment, showing that the erosion of time usually has the last word on everything. Preparing his script for 12 years, Ciafrance had the merit to find two very great actors who play with a natural confusing strangers, lovers, then husband and wife.
Without ever being mere victims or perpetrators, the couple remains human, in contrast with most Hollywood productions where the characters seem perfect and invincible. Mixing vulnerability and strength of the feline, Michelle Williams recalls that it is one of the finest treasures of his generation. Yet Ryan Gosling who eventually eclipse, embodying Fouga and passion with a man who has very little to do with that he embodied in “The Notebook”.
Constantly playing dichotomies between this highly granular yesterday improvised like a Cassavetes (the father, not his son) and one today where tension spreads by close-ups, “Blue Valentine” constantly escapes traps of melodrama, with one hand the infinite possibilities of tomorrow to better tighten your fist on the hard work. The finding of a sad dark without being maudlin, is filtered multiple beams of sun that periodically brings the humor, poetry and sensitivity. Lovers of true love stories for adults (as “Two Lovers”, “I Am Love” or “Mademoiselle Chambon”) will be met.
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