>>REVIEW
STORIES ABOUT LOVE
Wednesdays at 6 p.m.
Bravo!
With a newly shattered nose, our snakeskin-jacket-wearing protagonist, Sailor (Nicolas Cage), begins to sing the Elvis Presley classic "Love Me Tender." The blond-haired love of his life, Lulu (Laura Dern), swoons to the sound of her man’s sweet serenade and the film credits begin to roll. It was only here, at the end of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, that I became fully aware that the 1990 movie I had just watched was a love story.
With his trademark offbeat storytelling style, director Lynch takes audiences to many murky, bizarre and even horrifying places in Wild at Heart before dropping that warm and romantic final scene on us. The film is proof that a daring, peculiar love story is destined to stick in one’s memory a lot longer than the countless by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedies we have been subjected to for the past two decades. I mean, does anybody even care to remember the contrived and tepid 1998 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan picture You’ve Got Mail? No, I didn’t think so.
The multiple award nominations and solid box-office numbers that have greeted Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, a film with a complicated homosexual relationship at its core, prove that there is currently a large appetite for well-told non-traditional love stories.
Bravo!, the Canadian arts and lifestyle channel, is also doing its part to further the cause of unconventional romantic cinema by airing the Stories About Love film series. The project began in the summer of 2003, when Bravo’s parent company, CHUM Limited, invited emerging and diverse Canadian filmmakers to send in their film scripts for a shot at qualifying for $100,000 in funding and licensing considerations.
The resulting eight one-hour films in the anthology appropriately reflect the diverse cultural makeup of Canada. The films that have already aired include Floored by Love, a film about a Chinese-Japanese lesbian couple considering marriage, and Mindless Love, which deals with a nerdy aboriginal teen dabbling in love potions.
Coming up is A Perfect Note, starring James Sanders as a white, wheelchair-bound composer-musician married to an African-American woman played by The Young and the Restless soap opera star Tonya Lee Williams. As the film opens, Sanders has become emotionally detached from both his wife and daughter (Santana Shaw-Garlock), when a lively jazz-singing aunt (Candus Churchill) arrives to stir things up. While there’s no denying that A Perfect Note is an uneven film with far from award-worthy performances, it does have a heart and a belief in itself that carries it through to its satisfying, if not surprising, conclusion.
Following it in the anthology lineup is Love’s a Gamble, a more polished production about a grieving South Asian widow who comes to live with her white-collar professional son and his family in Toronto. Feeling like an unwelcome disruption, the widow considers leaving her son, Caucasian daughter-in-law and bi-racial grandson when she unexpectedly befriends a most unusual and surprisingly charming man. Love’s a Gamble succeeds thanks to the chemistry between the widow, played by one-name actor Dhirendra, and her rough-edged new acquaintance, portrayed by veteran Canadian character actor Nick Mancuso.
Stories About Love continues through March 29 with upcoming films featuring a draft dodger in search of a long lost love and the tale of a young man dying of AIDS.
A Perfect Note airs February 22 and Love’s a Gamble can be seen March 1. |
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