In the City of Sylvia: (2007. dir: Jose Luis Guerin) A young artist makes a pilgrimage to Strasbourg on a quest to find a girl he'd met briefly six years previous in a bar. It sounds like nothing much. Instead, it's the framework upon which Guerin hangs a truly unique and delicately filigreed sequence of perfect, intimate shots. The unnamed artist himself is not so much suffering a yearning for Sylvia as he is using her as catalyst for an adventure in the scrutiny of women. We see all manner of women through his eyes, and the camera has no qualms about lingering longer than any American camera would dare, Malick-like, on some fascinating image: the back of a girl's stationary head, for instance, as her long, straight hair is whipped in the wind. We watch a long still-life on the endtable in a motel room at night, with a key and a crucial map drawn on a bar napkin, watch as headlights pass and alter the lighting across it in pleasing ways. This camera also plays games with us: in a long scene at a cafe where nothing happens except that the artist watches the people there, we see a two-shot of a man and woman sitting silently next to one another, facing forward, and we assume they are together until the woman sets down her drink and rests her head on the shoulder of the man on her other side. Although one senses that not finding Sylvia may be a better thing than finding her, the film itself is a paen not to the pain of yearning, but to its joyful side and the creative inspiration which rises up from it.
Terrence Malick: With the exception of Badlands, whose characters are too non-introspective perhaps to yearn properly, all Malick films incorporate heavy yearnings woven into their fabrics. Think of Sam Shepard silently falling in love with Brooke Adams' dark beauty in Days of Heaven from his distant hilltop, then of Richard Gere luring her from her husband's bed on a later evening. In the Thin Red Line, Ben Chaplin's soldier pulls himself length by length through an endless war using thick strands of daydream about his beautiful wife, then finds himself foundering and bereft after she writes him a terrible letter. The New World, perhaps the world's masterpiece of yearning, has at its center a breathtaking sequence in which Pocahontas yearns herself crazy then to the brink of suicide over her lost Captain Smith, only to find her salvation in one gorgeous moment of divine grace.
In the Mood for Love: (2000. dir: Wong Kar Wai) Much ink has been spilled about the beauty and grace of this symphony in forlorn and unfinished love between Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan. It falls somewhere between a stately minuet and a very intimate, very sensual samba. In moments more like a fashion show than a film (we spend a lot of time watching Maggie Cheung's lovely ass in gorgeous '60s sheaths as she walks out of rooms and up stairs), it nonetheless provides the long-lived melancholy of impossible love with an indelible language of its own.
Destiny: (1921. dir: Fritz Lang) This is one of those early triptychs, like Paul Leni's later Waxworks: Lang uses the overstory of a zaftig madchen playing a game with Death to win her round-faced lover back from the underworld as a framework to hold three stories of crossed love which traverse the globe and history. The exquisite sense of longing here does not emanate from the ostensible heroine, who seems to be seeking her lost lover more out of a confusion about what to do with herself in his absence than some deeper, more legitimate feeling, but from der Tod himself, strikingly played by Bernhard Goetzke, whose stony face communicates an anguish of longing to break out of his dreadful role. The legend is that Lang was inspired to this film by a dream he'd had in his youth, and what it lacks in depth it makes up for in compelling images, like a girl walking up stairs framed by a mysterious gateway after she's taken poison.
Damnation: (1988. dir: Bela Tarr) Even more heavily stylized than the Wong Kar Wai (heavy in more than a single sense), Damnation is a slow-moving study in shades of gray. It moves at about the pace of hardening cement inching down an inclined plane, enjoying the pleasures of textures and framing as it goes. It doesn't so much praise yearning as wallow in it, as a man might dive into a water-tank and revel in the waters as his strength leaves him, all the while knowing the walls are too steep and slick for him to climb back out, and that he will die there.
Karrer (Miklos Szekely B.) treads heavily through a Soviet-bloc town made out of concrete, rain and mud, bearing like Atlas the weight of impossible love, or rather the impossibility of love. His beloved is a Nico-like chanteuse who sings sitting down, her hand covering her face, her song so weighted with despair it can hardly emerge. This is a bleak, Slavic brand of yearning, hardened and flattened into a sort of walking damnation, its cause equal (and equally cruel) parts inexorable fate and human caprice. In fact, it is so very bleak as to play as a sort of joke, like a Bergman parody in a Woody Allen film, and I wonder if there is not a strong undercurrent of satire which fails to register because I am experiencing it through the distancing medium of subtitles, and the culture gap of having grown up in the mercurial giddiness of capitalist America.
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