Be My Valentine - ScreenAnarchy Style

Back in 2004, I predicted that Jeux D'Enfants had a good shot at being that years Memento, a film that comes out of nowhere due to an audacious style and becomes an instant cult classic, catapulting its director into A-list projects in Hollywood.  Well what do I know?  It was critically panned and ignored by its distributor and any potential audience, although has picked up a little cult following from the eventual stardom of both its leads (Marion Cotillard and Guillaume Canet.)  When trying to get folks to see this film, my pitch for the film is 'When Harry Met Sally meets Fight Club by way of Terry Gilliam.'  It follows two star-crossed lovers as they squander their chances together with a betting game with increasingly high stakes involving trains, fire, and emotional warfare of the extreme kind.  All of it scored by many versions of La Vie en Rose; probably the reason why Cotillard got the gig to play Edith Piaf and eventualy won a Oscar.  Jeux D'Enfants is not Academy friendly, and best watched with a life-time platonic friend who won't throw you under the bus.

In the middle of Lucky McKee's fascinatingly off-putting (in the best possible way) film, Jeremy Sisto's stubble chinned beau flirts with the shy but determined May, played by Angela Bettis, by showing her his homemade film involving love, a picnic and cannibalism by lovers at play.  May loves it, interprets it as a quite literal suggestion and the tries (in a fashion) to devour him sexually.  This does not go well. There are several other things she likes (odds and ends) which gives her a macabre idea for a replacement to her imaginary doll-friend.  Eventually she makes her ideal companion in a novel, if horrific, way.   Far from an ode to compromise, this is love in its full demanding form.  Yet, it is nevertheless a gothic-romance that is part Dario Argento, part Mary Shelley and all good fun.  Not really Valentine's Day related, but watch for the scene involving a bunch of blind kids and a glass case.  Be prepared to look away.  (Wince!)

Outside of the recent Blue Valentine (or David Fincher's Seven, quite seriously the film I first took my wife on a date too), Takashi Miike's Audition is perhaps the ultimately wrong first-date movie.  When a long-time widower takes (bad) advice from his co-worker to hold TV auditions, not for a new show, but perhaps for a potential new wife, a young innocent woman sits demurely on a chair to be interviewed.  A 'callback' from the widower requesting a formal date reveals the image above and what follows is one of Miike's most cringe-worthy, restrained, and ultimately effective exercises in demented horror.  This film was for the turn of the century what Hitchcock's Psycho was for the mid 20th century:  an audience eye-opener.

 

Save The Green Planet (2003) 

A prank on the unsuspecting domestic audience saw Save The Green Planet marketed as a romantic comedy and released not long after Valentine's Day in South Korea.  Those of have seen the manic delights offered by this film will know full well that it is not really a romantic comedy (although there is an offbeat relationship in there which is charming.)  Rather, on the menu is gleeful torture, pathological delusion, possible alien invasion and the most inefficient way ever shown to kill a swarm of bees.  It amounts to one of the strangest movies from a country whose cinema excels in switching tone on a heartbeat.  If you have not had a chance to partake of this oddity, then - Run (don't walk) to your retailer of asian DVDs or (nowadays) browse on over to whatever VOD service you use!

Mike Nichols' capper of his 'battle of the genders trilogy' (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Carnal Knowledge could have easily ended up on this list) has one of the queens of the Rom-Com, Julia Roberts,  telling hunky Clive Owen that she thinks the taste of Jude Law's cum is a bit sweeter. (Owen's response: "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die, you fucked up slag.") OK, I'm pulling this dialogue out of context a bit, but there you have it.  This ain't Runaway Bride.  The film follows the romantic and relationship failure of four people (the other is Natalie Portman playing a stripper over half a decade before her headlong trip into ballet dementia with Darren Aronfosky), and how they hurt each other emotionally along the way.  Its a great date flick.  

Here is a fascinating confection of a film, cotton candy laced with arsenic. A La Folie...Pas Du Tout (or its English title of He Loves Me...He Loves Me Not) starts out as another glossy romantic adventure of Audrey Tautou in full Amélie Poulain mode, only a fair bit tackier. But it ends up venturing down corridors not often explored in a bubbly romance, the high romantic is a bit of psychotic stalker, and the dreamy hunk is a bit of a clueless victim. Watch for Tatou's gift to her lover midway through the film, it doesn't get more Valentine's Day that that particular image. This one seemed to fall through the cracks, even though Sony Pictures had the good sense to release it shortly after Jean Pierre Jeunet's massively successful Amélie right on February 14th without letting an unsuspecting audience in on the plot.  À La Folie...Pas du Tout is not a perfect film, but an undiscovered gem nonetheless.

You can debate whether or not you find Wong Kar Wai's 1994 masterpiece a romantic fever-dream where nobody ever ends up together, or whether it is a bitter-sweet tale of near misses.  Either way, it is a beautiful, kinetic film that makes you feel entranced, happy and melancholic all at the same time, like only wkw can do.  Is this really the apotheosis of the anti-romantic movie?  Hardly, but its good enough that it would be a great bit of valentines day viewing for cinemaphiles coupled or alone.  And Brigitte Lin in a blonde wig and mans rain-coat that in some unfathomable way becomes magnificently iconic!