Blue Valentine

I let Blue Valentine sit on my PVR for over a year before I finally watched it last night. Maybe I intuited how painful the experience would be and procrastinated from it. There is nothing new to the film's plot, which details the deterioration of a love forged on youthful desire and an accidental pregnancy. With two brilliant performances at its heart, the film stands out with its close-up (both literally and metaphorically) of two people falling in and out of love. Exceptionally skillful is the way it alternates two temporalities - the beginning and the end of the relationship - throughout the narrative. Scenes of raw sensuality and genuine sweetness of a youthful romance intercut with that of fatigue, aggression, and the stale desire of a faltering middle-aged marriage. Watching these two "bookends" of a relationship shift into each other, it suddenly occurred to me that the birth and death of love have always existed as parts of each other. At the very height of desire there is an edge, the cresting of something that will inevitably decline. And in the coldest moment of love's death, flashes of warmth linger and refuse to be entirely obliterated. If we look hard enough, we see that love's ecstasy and its terror seep imperceptibly into one another. Blue Valentine is one of those very rare films that dares us to experience this interstice, of love at its truest - and its most unbearable.