Heartbreak is a universal experience and the backbone of most popular art. Film, more than any medium, captures this visceral devastation. As an audience, we seek out art that reflects our personal lives, allowing us space to relive emotional memories through the reimagining of relatable circumstances. Romantic hardship affects everyone at some point, which is why there is a need for meaningful representation of these shared experiences in cinema.
The filmmakers of this “rom-dram” genre use narrative structure, music, and dramatic chemistry to encapsulate what it’s like to lose yourself in another person. Every film portraying the difficulty of relationships offers something incredibly distinct, encouraging a diverse audience to resonate with the story.
Coming-of-age romance
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Lenny Abrahamson’s Normal People explore the intensity of young love with a coming-of-age story mixed in.
Call Me by Your Name’s summery European aesthetic builds a delectable world perfect for first love. The film follows 17-year-old Elio as he falls for 24-year-old Oliver over a life-changing summer. Elio’s character personifies that feeling of unrest that emerges when suppressing the overwhelming desire characteristic of a crush.
While exploring his youth and sexuality, Elio begins to discover his definition of love within his relationship with Oliver. Even in a dreamlike setting, we see how this romanticized young love is unsustainable, as we watch Elio’s dependency grow and begin to understand that summer can’t last forever.
In Normal People, we follow Connell and Marianne from high school to adulthood as their lives repeatedly intertwine. This story demonstrates how relationships formed at a young age can keep a tight hold on people. Abrahamson uses the script to deepen who the characters are, their pathways through life, and their wants in one another that can’t always be fulfilled. This story focuses especially on the weight that silence holds in a relationship, never shying away from what is being said beyond words.
Idealized vs. Realistic Love
Other films like 500 Days of Summer and Blue Valentine are effective in visualizing the slow burn of heartbreak. As two people fall from the climax of their relationship, they have to attempt to adjust to the lack of excitement. Both Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance, and 500 Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, tell their stories in a nonlinear way to give the audience a constant juxtaposition of past and present — what worked then that’s not working now.
Taking a fresh approach, both films use flashback effects to show how the characters transformed based on shared experiences. 500 Days of Summer deconstructs the traditional love story by contrasting the highs of infatuation with the lows of realizing your incompatibility. The movie captures the bittersweet truth that love is often remembered more fondly than it was lived.
The raw and nuanced performances given by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine are transformative. As their marriage unravels, we see their hope melt away physically and mentally. Like the aftermath of any significant relationship, both love and hurt are present in their encounters. It shows how intense pain is born from intense passion.
Remembering heartbreak
The memory of heartbreak is another theme of the “rom-dram” genre. It reminds us that past romances can never be erased. Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry, is a surreal romantic drama that follows Joel and Clementine as they undergo a procedure to erase memories of their failed relationship, only to realize that love is impossible to fully forget.
The fight to “delete” each other from their lives ends in regret on both ends as every bond formed, good or bad, is integral to the person they become. This unrealistic concept is still relatable to most viewers because the struggle that comes with letting something go can be unbearable.
This idea is also explored in Celine Song’s Past Lives, as childhood sweethearts who reconnect years later explore the inevitability of fate and the lingering pull of what could have been. Past Lives‘ use of distance between the characters builds tension, eventually forcing them to come to terms with the untimeliness of love and how it can make or break a relationship.
Moviegoers thirst for a story they can relate to, a story that elicits a lasting reaction. It’s useless to pretend that heartbreak isn’t a natural part of the human experience. This is why we as an audience long for a sense of understanding within cinema and media in general.
Romantic dramas based on lost love ignore the conventions of the usual love story and place the paths of their characters in complete realism. In response, we are constantly reminded of the growth that can emerge from broken relationships.
The act of love is not something to be doomed but, instead, something to experience wholeheartedly.
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