Love Is Strange (15)

Director: Ira Sachs

Starring: John Lithgow, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei

STRANGE, enervating, toxic, miraculous, unrequited, redemptive: love exerts an irresistible hold on the human heart.

Greek philosopher Plato professed love to be a serious mental disease, while Martin Luther King Jr believed it to be the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

For filmmaker Ira Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias, love is a long-term relationship between two gay men set against the bustling backdrop of modern-day Manhattan.

Underscored predominantly by Chopin, Love Is Strange is an elegant character study, which sketches these middle-aged soul-mates with tenderness and heart-breaking intimacy.

Sachs' film is illuminated by two exquisite performances from John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a married couple who are wary of relying on the kindness of family and friends.

Familiarity breeds not just contempt but also disillusionment, suspicion and, ultimately, aching loneliness.

Ben (Lithgow) and his partner George (Molina) have spent almost four decades together.

They finally legalise their union in front of family and friends including Ben's nephew Elliot (Darren Burrows) and wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), plus police office neighbours Ted (Cheyenne Jackson) and Roberto (Manny Perez).

Shortly after the happy day, George loses his job as a music teacher at St Grace's Church and Catholic school in Manhattan because Facebook pictures of the honeymoon in Petra have been brought to the attention of the Archdiocese.

Without George's steady income, the couple face the prospect of having to sell their highly desirable apartment.

George moves in with Ted and Roberto, while Ben seeks shelter with Elliot, Kate and their truculent teenage son Joey (Charlie Tahan), who is far from thrilled about sharing his bunk bed with an elderly gay uncle.

The separation causes friction between family and friends.

Love Is Strange treats all of the flawed characters with a delicate and even hand although our hearts invariably belong to the leads.

Lithgow and Molina perform as if they have been sharing the same space for decades, trading gentle touches or longing glances as their carefully ordered world unravels.

Love is a drug and regardless of the withdrawal symptoms, we all want to be addicts.

 

- FIFTY Shades of Grey also hits cinemas this Friday in time for Valentine's Day.

With 500,000 advance tickets sold in the UK, Sam Taylor-Wood's eagerly anticipated screen version of E.L. James' novel is poised for a whip-cracking opening weekend.

James self-published the first instalment of her raunchy trilogy before the first hardback edition was released in March 2012.

Critics might have been less than flattering, giving the book a sharp verbal spanking, but the public were seduced by James' depiction of the intensely physical relationship between a college graduate and a handsome businessman and propelled the tome to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the UK, such was the clamour for copies of the paperback that Fifty Shades Of Grey outsold JK Rowling and Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, and opened the floodgates on a raft of books crudely dubbed 'mummy porn'.

The story sees literature student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) interview and then fall for charming multimillionaire businessman Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan).

In order to get closer to the object of her affections, the student submits to Christian and he introduces her to an erotically charged world of domination.