7 visions of love brought to the big screen

In 1963, Luchino Visconti made one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces with The Leopard. This adaptation of the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa novel of the same name explores the complexities of human relationships among the declining Sicilian nobility of the 19th century. Concerned with preserving his family’s aristocratic prestige, Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera (Burt Lancaster) agrees to marry his nephew Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon) off to Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), heiress to a rising bourgeois family. In his film, Visconti magnifies the timeless power of love and human connections, which become keys to understand the past, capture the present and imagine the future: “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” (Tancredi Falconeri, played by Alain Delon). The Leopard was a triumph on the Croisette and was unanimously awarded the Palme d’or.

With A Man and a Woman, Claude Lelouch celebrates the refrain of love. The director dives into the delicate and tumultuous private lives of two interconnected souls and manages to capture what is both ephemeral and permanent in this relationship. In Deauville, between separations and reunions, Anne (Anouk Aimée) and Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) find love and redemption despite their painful pasts. The film unfolds like a timeless ode, a chabadabada, a bewitching melody that resonates beyond the screen. The director makes each exchange of glances, each movement, a symphony of love. Winner of the Palme d’or in 1966 (tied with Pietro Germi’s Signore e Signori – The Birds, the Bees and the Italians), the film is a sparkling celebration of passion.

“I wanted to create a portrait of a man and a woman as I had imagined them: two beings above the world they were living in. People who understood how to always keep things in perspective, who were sensitive to nuance and who were never given over to excess. A Man and a Woman is a film about a happy medium. That’s something that has always fascinated me and I wanted to make a film about the happy medium of a couple.” Claude Lelouch (source)

“She was as beautiful as the day. But I liked women who were as beautiful as the night.”

In 1973, The Mother and the Whore was screened at Cannes and caused a scandal. Jean Eustache, its director, showed that he was ahead of his time, defying the cinematographic conventions of the age. With crude and unfiltered language, the film explores the complexities of romantic relationships and human desires. It focuses on the interconnected relationships of a love triangle, where Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) tries to reconcile his desire for a stable relationship with Marie (the Mother, Bernadette Lafont) and his aspiration to give meaning to his life with Veronika (the Whore Françoise Lebrun). This work, emblematic for an entire generation, received the Jury’s Special Grand Prix under the presidency of Ingrid Bergman and still has an enduring influence on contemporary cinema, inspiring directors like Harmony Korine, Gaspar Noé and Olivier Assayas.

“It’s the story of a completely dysfunctional attempt at communal love, but so accurate right down to the smallest detail that it becomes eternal, outside of time.” Gaspar Noé (source)

“My first film, my very first film, had a lot of ideas, as all debut films do. […] It’s been ten years. Time’s passed. I practically thought of giving up on cinema… And then, I decided again to do it. And I’ve considered this film, The Mother and the Whore, as my debut film, as if I hadn’t done anything before. I wanted to say a lot of things, all at once, as one does for a debut film, that is, in a jumble, all together, without outlining, without stylising.” Jean Eustache (source)

Wild at Heart, or the crazy and passionate love story between two lost souls in America who have disturbing encounters while on the run from the girl’s jealous and psychopathic mother. For his fifth feature film, David Lynch adapted Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, having wanted to make a fairy tale…

Highly committed to their roles, the couple played by Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage spent a weekend in Las Vegas to forge the bonds that were essential for the creation of their characters. At the end of shooting, Nicolas Cage gave his now iconic snakeskin jacket to his acting partner! (Source – in French)

This off-kilter road movie, dark and sensual, which was awarded the Palme d’or by a jury presided over by Bernardo Bertolucci in Cannes in 1990, is anchored in our memories as featuring one of cinema’s most mythical couples. Love me tender, Love me sweet!

In 1992, Paul Verhoeven’s scandalous thriller Basic Instinct opened the Festival de Cannes. In this work, the borders between love, seduction and danger are blurred, giving rise to a space to explore the darker and more ambiguous aspects of passion. Michael Douglas plays inspector Nick Curran, investigating a murder implicating Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone), an enigmatic novelist with a troubled past. Their complex relationship evolves into a dangerous game where sexuality is transformed into a weapon of manipulation.

“I’ve always been drawn to ambiguous roles people can identify with. In Basic Instinct, an affair causes my character to spiral, to the extent that every viewer wonders what they themselves would have done in so impossible a situation.” Michael Douglas (source)

Screened in the Official Selection and In Competition in 2000, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love transports the viewer to Hong Kong in the 1960s. This film is a profound meditation on solitude, desire and elective affinities. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai – winner of the Award for Best Actor – and Maggie Cheung gracefully portray two neighbours brought together by the discovery of an affair between their respective partners. Behind the camera, Wong Kar-Wai, alongside Christopher Doyle (cinematographer), captures what is not said, the inexpressible and the unsayable, turning each moment into a poetic painting structured by a captivating soundtrack. Its exploration of intimacy captures the melancholic beauty and the nostalgia of the excitement of love with a rare emotional power.

“I’m not telling the story of an affair, but a certain attitude to a moment in the history of Hong Kong and how people experienced it. I thought that the story of an affair could be quite boring, as there have been so many films on the same subject. There is no winner in an affair. I was looking for a different angle. It seemed more interesting to me to look at this story through the prism of a time that has passed, and the relationship of the characters to their history over the years. They keep this secret and this secret seems to me to be the most interesting subject of the film.” Wong Kar-Wai (press kit – excerpts of an interview in Cannes on 21 May 2000 by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for Positif)

Titane by Julia Ducournau explores the frontiers between attraction and repulsion, tenderness and brutality. This genre film tells the stories, between two solitudes, of Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a mute dancer who was the victim of an accident, and Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a firefighter looking for his son Adrien, who disappeared 10 years ago. Julia Ducournau depicts this emotional connection as a force that can’t be tamed, capable of transcending the limits of body and mind. Dance, ubiquitous in the film, becomes the visual language that expresses the power of the paternal link and raises love above words and gestures. With her second feature film, Julia Ducournau became the second female director to win the highest distinction of the Festival de Cannes during the 74th edition of the Festival.

“My process is about always reaching further and avoiding repetition. I try to dig deep into what seems impossible to convey. That was the case for Titane, in fact. After Raw, I realised that it was hard for me to discuss love openly, and so I tried to tackle it in my own way, by sparking feeling rather than explicitly saying anything. It was extremely challenging.” Julia Ducournau (source)