The other day, gathered on the couch sharing chips and weekly updates, my friends and I dug into our favourite movies. You can tell a lot about a person from their go-to films, the same way you can gain an insight into their personality from a look at their bedroom, or from overhearing the muffle of their music. They mean something. As one of my friends, Carly, took a guess at my top four movies (after hearing me talk about them so much), I started to really think about why I loved them. Boyhood, Marriage Story, Beginners and Frances Ha. I mean, you don’t have to be some sort of film scholar to understand how those four films live in the same cinematic universe. Carly said she always thought I liked those films because they are about relationships, and I think she’s right. But more than that, I like them because they are about people.
To my core, I am a realist. I think the most interesting stories are the ones that feel honest. As a child, I never craved fantasy. My dad would tell me stories growing up to help me fall asleep. I could always tell when he was telling me something fictional, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted him to recite the mundanities of his real life. Stories from his childhood, about his hockey team or his weekend trips to the cottage. I liked when he described — in excruciating detail — the contents of his neighbourhood candy store growing up. There’s just always been something about a thoroughly developed, simple story.
If you were to ask me what happens in any of the movies above, I could answer the same way: someone loses themselves only to find themselves again. Someone falls in love only to fall out of it. Someone’s life is so beautiful, complex, messy, sad and exciting all at once.
Though their plots are mundane, something about this type of narrative makes me feel so alive, so connected, and so human. I crave the romanticization of sadness. I find the depth of emotion to be beautiful and poetic; it’s what reminds me how nuanced the human experience is. The watcher of anything is naturally self-indulgent — they will look for a connection to their own experience, whether watching Superman or The Truman Show or anything in between. Honest, realist films set the stage for connection and self-reflection with gentle insistence, bridging the gap between the screen and its viewer, and allowing us to feel seen and validated.
So yes, I like sad movies about sad people doing little to nothing. But beneath that, I crave stories that allow me to feel, harvest my empathy, and ignite my psychoanalytic streak. I watch to really examine people, to drag them out of their tight little boxes and make more room for fluidity. To watch them be so many different things at once. I think in my practice of character examination I’ve become a less judgmental and more cognizant person. To me, a movie is only as good as its characters; without them, I have no investment and I simply loose interest. My top four movies promise multidimensional characters, overwhelmingly beautiful dialogue, and genuine relationships, and I’m not ashamed of their similarities.