It is a truth universally acknowledged that love doesn’t exist… Isn’t that how the line goes?
How many times have you heard that? Either love doesn’t exist or it sucks, most of us can agree on that. The love we’re constantly shown is full of lies. There are no such things as love at first sight or one true love for each of us. In fact, we can experience love several times, and in so many ways, that it becomes our own unique version rather than a copy of a fairy tale we all know by heart. I mean, does anybody love spoilers? Not really. Uncertainty and mystery are what makes of love so exciting.
Going back our initial line, based on the one and only Jane Austen, not even the classic love stories deal with the idea of the perfect couple. Come on, Lizzie and Darcy weren’t actually what we would consider as two people meant to be together. So, why do we still believe in such lies? For that reason, here are 6 movies that show how love is not always perfect and meant to be. Instead, they show us the beauty of imperfectness.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Emmi, a 60-year-old woman, finds shelter from the rain in an Arab bar. There she meets Ali, a Muslim man in his thirties. Soon, they start a friendship that ends up in romance. However, the race and age differences start meddling in their relationship when they notice that the people around them don’t accept their love, making their bond way stronger. But what happens when all of a sudden people stop judging them? What happens when what brought them closer together disappears? Will they still love each other?
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Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Barry Egan is a self-centered and apparently calmed business man. Growing up with his seven sisters, he still has some attitudes that we would call childish. In fact, that tranquility can be easily turned into explosive rage whenever things don’t work the way he wants. Among this changing emotional mixture, he meets Lena, a mysterious but nice woman with which he starts a romantic relationship. However, his personality will present a huge obstacle.
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Silver Linings Playbook (2012) Dir. David O. Russell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ZitHzsS1s
A man is released from the psychiatric hospital where he was treated for a violent incident involving his ex-wife’s lover. He has been dealing with a severe depressive disorder and, in his attempts to remember what really happened in that incident, he becomes obsessed with exercise and reading. However, it all changes when he meets Tiffany, a young widow with attitude problems. Soon they’ll find out that they need the other’s instability to feel sane.
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Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche
Adèle, a high-school student who enjoys talking about boys and dreams about finding the love of her life, faces an identity struggle when she meets a rebellious lesbian college co-ed. After hanging out with her, the teen discovers she has feelings for her. Her relationship with Emma makes her classmates uncomfortable and start ostracizing her, but she finds comfort in her new interesting friend. Of course, they develop a romantic relationship that soon ends all of Adèle’s insecurities and doubts about her own sexuality.
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I Love You Philip Morris (2009) Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
This unconventional black comedy tells the story of Steven, a former police officer, Phillip, a prison inmate, and their unlikely love story. Steven, a man obsessed with finding his biological mother, decides that his life isn’t fulfilling him anymore after a car accident. He divorces his wife and starts exploring his sexuality as a gay man. Wanting to have a completely different life, he becomes a hustler that soon gets caught by the police and locked up in jail. It’s there where he meets and falls for Philip Morris. Although their relationship is filled with obstacles, at the end of the day both do the impossible to be together.
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Laurence Anyways (2012) Dir. Xavier Dolan
Life is filled with impossible loves, but perhaps not as complex as this one. A woman called Frederique and a man named Laurence start a romantic relationship that soon gets complicated when the latter confesses that he wants to continue his life as his true self, meaning as a woman. The movie shows us their story of how they both try hard to make things work, but it’s not as easy as they thought and split. Even when Laurence has moved on with her life, she will never stop loving Frederique because, at the end of the day, one falls in love with a person, not with a gender.
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Sometimes past experiences make us pessimistic about love and relationships. Besides that, all those cheesy stories we see constantly only make us cynical beings. If you like watching stories that shatter that fairy tale love perception, take a look at these:
Films That Show True Love Has No Happy Endings
4 Love Lessons That Sad Romance Films Have Taught Us
The Series That Will Make You Understand Different Kinds Of Unrequited Love
