#LFF Blue Valentine - hankies at the ready

My first ever London Film Festival film this afternoon. I felt like a kid who's been allowed to sit at the grown-ups' table - shame the grown ups can't all arrive on time but more about that at the end of the post.

So Blue Valentine is a subtle piece about young couple Cindy and Dean who's marriage seems to have gone cold.  It focuses on just two periods in their relationship - the beginning and the end, jumping between the two.

Over the course of the two hours you gradually learn where their relationship is rooted and how it got to be in its current state. 

But this isn't the cliched story of affairs or bad husbands/wives it's much more subtle than that and all the rawer for it. It's about choices you make early on in your life and whether you can live with them.

In the later relationship Cindy (a beautifully underplayed performance by Michelle Williams) is preoccupied and snappy while Dean (a mature performance by Ryan Gosling) goes about his normal routine goofing around with his young daughter. Both know there is something wrong but shy away from confronting it.

The script by Derek Cianfrance, Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne is sharply observed and the isolation Cindy and Dean ultimately feel is heightened by the fact that we are given no insight into how they really feel other than the little the say and how they behave towards each other.

It would have been easy to have given them each a friend to off-load to but that would have diluted the emotionally charged atmosphere. It would also have been easy to have concocted some out of the ordinary event from their past or in their future but it is the ordinariness and lack of sentimentality which makes for such a moving and poignant film.

I'm giving it five stars because it is upsetting me all over again just writing about it. No review ratings to refer to as it's pre-official release so you'll have to take my word for it.

* There is an interesting video interview with Williams and Gosling over on IMDB in which they talk about how director Cianfrance approached filming, keeping the actors apart so they did all their getting to know each other in front of the camera, filming the past and the present parts of the relationship a month apart and on different types of film, for example.

 

 

 

And now for my two part moan about the NFT:

1. The seating configuration seems designed so that you always have someones head in your sight line. I had to spend the entire film leaning right out over my arm rest to see around the head of the lady sat directly in front of me (luckily I was on an aisle). On previous visits when the screen isn't too full I've moved seats - I'd think twice about seeing anything subtitled because you'd run the risk of not being able to read whole chunks.

2. For the first twenty minutes of the film late-comers were still being allowed in. It is really distruptive and someone behind me in the audience got so exasperated they told one couple to just hurry up and sit down. They should advertise more widely the fact that the film actually starts at the time specified unlike mainstream cinemas where there is 20 minutes of adverts and trailers. Or even better not let anyone in once the film has started. The Picturehouse chain has that policy and theatre's have that policy for plays where there isn't a natural scene pause.