Blue Valentine

Don’t take your girlfriend, they said. Depressing but like real life, they said. Oscar-worthy performances, they said. While all of the above are true, and my girlfriend did leave slightly red-eyed, it was, above all, a superb, transcendentally brilliant film. Intriguing, gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure, it brilliantly walks the line between indie romance and dirty realism.

Blue Valentine tells the outwardly simple story of Dean and Cindy, their relationship and its seemingly terminal decline; it starts with a scream and ends in a firework display. But this is certainly not the stuff of the Hollywood rom-com. For one, it has a quite controversial past as the American board of censors took umbrage at its graphic descriptions of sex – and particularly oral sex – and slapped it with an NC-17 rating, precluding TV advertising. Although it was rescinded on following an appeal, the anecdote certainly serves to show the sort of feathers the film has and will ruffle.

Through a series of flashbacks, the sparse storyline is leant a tragic poignancy as events slide inexorably towards the cathartic conclusion. There we see Dean and Cindy’s background, when they first meet, their wedding; here Gosling’s natural charm and attractiveness shine through. He and Michelle Williams are coruscating as the two leads and inhabit the characters with 70s De Niro brilliance. Their dealings with their daughter, the way they go about their lives and, above all, the way they are with each other contain a seldom-seen realistic quality. The writing and the seemingly haphazard accretion of details, causes, reasons and recriminations only add to this feeling. The fact that Gosling looking around a stone and half a head of hair lighter is meant to signify the nadir of early middle-age loserdom would be my only complaint.

Any film with a (fitting and excellent) soundtrack by Grizzly Bear is going to be leant a stately melancholy, at least in my eyes, and this is no different. Its powerful examination of romance, love, sexuality and the ageing process lingers long in the mind. I am certainly still thinking of it forty-eight hours later. A must-see.