Unlikely love stories

You were made of every love and each regret

A recent post discussion over at Dr Mabuse segued into a small conversation about love stories in films or, rather (and more interestingly), unlikely love stories... ie, not your straightforward they-meet-and-fall-in-love types and variants, but films which aren't really about a romantic relationship at all, but, in the final analysis, are actually nothing but.

Which leads me to think about July Rhapsody as probably one of the most unlikeliest-love-story-films I could come up with. An astonishing film, it revolves around the lower middle-class family of Lam Yiu-Kwok (Jacky Cheung), who is a hardworking teacher, a family secret and Lam's complex relationship with Choy-Lam (Karena Lam), one of his students. In lesser hands, the Lolita motif, in its easy attraction and scandal, would simply take over the film, but the deftness of director Ann Hui is that she manages to balance all three key aspects of the plot (the family, the secret, the relationship) with beautiful skill, so that the sum is more than its parts: in the ensuing mesh, the film ends up being about all three aspects, yet at the same time none of them.

Why is this an unlikely-love-story-film? Because (without giving too much away), in the end it is a film about a couple who stays together because of a romance they did not share and a fate they did not ask for but a life which they have made together over twenty years. There is devotion, there is duty, yet one cannot help but ask in the end: is there love?

"You were made of every love and each regret", from Elvis Costello's "Still", is probably one of the most beautiful lyrics I have ever heard. "Still" is a love song, sung by a man "to a marvelous girl covered up in my coat". It is not just an assertion of the conventional "I-love-you-warts-and-all" banality, but an expression of being, of her being: you are made of love and regret and joy and sadness and a past which I cannot touch but which I can love.

So, is there love? Of course there is. They went through twenty years of poverty and hardship and raised two children together... and while the last scene is certainly ambiguous, that Lam holds his wife (Anita Mui) with at least tenderness is surely not. Then again, of course there isn't. Because it is a past which I cannot touch but which I can love, and which perhaps now is the time to let go.