Every once in a while, I stumble across something that reminds me what art should be. That I want something real. In my life. In the beautiful things I consume. All around me. Susanne Bier's phenomenal Open Hearts was such a reminder of what's real. From the very first shots, it's just brimming with this wonderful, acute sense of reality. No pretense, just this.
The story's basically about two couples where the woman from one runs over the man from the other. While the driver's husband's offering to help and console the victim's girlfriend, the two fall in love, which kicks up quite a whirlwind for them both. I loved it because although it falls into a fairly predictable predicament - the man, Niels, is forced to choose between his family and the mistress he falls desperately in love with - none of it is forced or feels artificial in the slightest.
It got me thinking and somehow had me circling back to an idea that's been on my mind all day - that no matter how you try to alienate and manufacture reality, it's all only just here. This is all we have. And just like that, art ties into life and vice-versa, the way it should be.
The here and now, that's your life. And isn't that just fantastic and frightful, both at once? I'm a big believer in designing a life you actually want to live. It's something I regularly come back to - am I living a life I would've been proud of as a kid with big dreams? Am I just letting it all go by? I try not to, and I tend to think I'm doing well most of the time, but I've come to realize as I've gotten older that it's not all just one fast-paced joyride before it's all over, and maybe that sounds infantile, but there it is.
I'm starting to see that life, this real, great painful beauty of it, is sometimes not altering the time and the space. It's letting the people who are willing to take a good, hard look at you properly see you. This is all we get, and we best make sure it's all for everything, lest we discover we've been living all for nothing, instead.
There's this really good scene where the two main characters have sex for the first time. It's very intimate and sexy, but also, I thought, raw in a way because though they've only just met and they've both obviously got other commitments, it doesn't fall into any of that cliche-y Hollywood toss about pseudo-moral qualms that people don't actually have. No half an hour's worth of hand-wringing before they do it. It just flows. The same way life does.
Some of the scenes are laugh-out-loud. I couldn't help myself when the doctor first tells the victim that he will be paralyzed for life. It's a heartbreaking moment, for sure, but the delivery is so no-BS and deadpan, you have to laugh. It's very un-American, and I think Hollywood's done us a great disservice, cause it's created this artificial notion of what real life should be like. How do you go about life, love, desire and heartbreak when you've been weaned on a heavy diet of sentimental Hollywood fakeries since youth?
I don't think that used to be a question, but it's definitely one now. My generation, for instance, grew up on Hollywood movies, and I'd say we all have certain ideas of what "it" should be like. And by "it", I really do mean everything. The rollercoaster, the life you're supposed to lead. And maybe that leads us away from the here and now. We sometimes get stuck trying so hard to live life by the Hollywoodian book, we forget to do the actual living. Maybe. Or think our own experience of life is in a way subpar because it doesn't hold up, except maybe life never did in the first place.
In 1995, there was this avant-garde movement in the Danish cinema world that Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg came up with, called Dogme 95 (or Dogma 95). It aimed to purify cinema of needless artifice and get back to what life actually is. The here and now. In order for filmmakers to do so, von Trier and Vinterberg came up with a set of rules, called the Vows of Chastity.
#7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
How do we remind ourselves life is in the here and now? That despite all our digital or imaginative attempts to be someplace else, this reality is all we have?
This is only half a movie review. It's a fantastic, really sexy, but also really sad movie. You should see it. You'll like it. Maybe. But it's also an open question.
