With the popular culture wrought with ubiquitous licentiousness and carnal provocation, those favoring more traditional depictions of love and erotic intimacy can often find themselves wandering in a wilderness of depravity.
But one has only to turn to some of Hollywood’s finest films to find that love can still be a many splendored thing. Here are my Valentine’s Day picks for couples who steamed things up without going too far south, and redeemed the good name of Eros.
Prince of Tides
No matter how you feel about singer Barbra Streisand’s politics, or the hits (Funny Girl) or misses (Yentl) of her film career, there’s no denying that her portrayal of a New York psychiatrist who falls for an appealing-but-troubled southern man is tasteful, redeeming, and smoking-hot.Once Nick Nolte’s character purges his dark secret in analysis, things quickly move from couch to bed, for all the right reasons. Though they part, in the closing scene the recovering patient acknowledges her healing power, and his enduring love.
Lost in Translation
May-November romance too often reveals the gulf between different ages, and causes complications. Hopefully there’s also an element of sexual compatibility somewhere along the way. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson don’t go near that far in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Oscar contender, but the wry and ineffable chemistry that develops between their characters in the environs of a stultifying Tokyo hotel touched magnificently on the nature of true love. We still don’t know what Bob Harris said to Charlotte before the big kiss, but we know in our hearts that whatever it was bodes well for affairs of the heart.Braveheart
Mel Gibson’s William Wallace was righteous and fearsome on the battlefield, but those traits account for only part of his charm. His fire-stoked love scene with Murron (Catherine McCormick) invoked the power of organic, spiritually-oriented devotion. After her death at the hands of the hated British sets in motion Wallace’s avenging hand, the beautiful Murron and the Scottish homeland became thematically inseparable, joined forever as the inspiration for a gloriously doomed revolution.
On Golden Pond
As Hollywood legend Bette Davis said, “Getting old is not for sissies.” Since most of us will experience old age, we can only hope that when the years catch up with us we’re lucky enough to share a bond as deep and lasting as the one shared by Norman and Ethel Thayer (Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn). Their togetherness and affection at the end of life is testament to how married love can help us go more gently into poet Dylan Thomas’s good night.
The Accidental Tourist
This dream-state evocation of loss, emotional cocooning, and the triumph of love is just as good as Anne Tyler’s bestselling 1985 novel. William Hurt’s somnambulant portrayal of Macon Leary, a travel writer whose marriage has crumbled after the death of an only son, sets the stage for the appearance of the flamboyant Muriel (Geena Davis). Her lust for life challenges his desolate interior landscape, and incontrovertibly proves that though the heart may not know from logic, if we listen, it knows exactly what can save us.
Cold Mountain
The lovemaking of great lovers who are only destined to make love once serves dramatically as the ultimate expression of love’s elusive poignancy.
In Anthony Minghella’s spectacular Civil War epic (from the book by Charles Frazier), it is destiny that Jude Law’s Inman and Nicole Kidman’s Ada Monroe will only consummate once what has proven over the ravages of war and time to be an abiding and preternaturally transcendent love.
When Renee Zellweger’s Ruby leaves the reunited lovers to their “lovey-dovey,” we can only imagine. Left to our imaginations, Eros blooms.
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