Film Review: Love Is Strange

Love is Strange
Directed by Ira Sachs

Love is Strange is a New York tale, even a New York parable which centres ob an older couple, Ben and George who, after 30 years of living together, get married .

They are all prepared for their new life together with their extended family of gay and straight friends. However, their dreams are shattered when George, who works as music teacher and choir master at the local Catholic school is fired because of his openly gay marriage. Without a job and reliant on Ben’s pension they become homeless, unable to rent an apartment and not able to qualify for assistance.

They fall back on the kindness of friends with Ben moving in with his niece Kate, her husband Elliot and their son Joey. George shares a flat with some gay cops and some other people. 

Their lives start to fall apart.

Even though supported by the love of family and friends they become aware of the way in which their lives begin to intersect with others – Ben endlessly chattering to his niece while she is trying to write her novel, Ben sharing the bunk bed with Joey, the tensions between Kate and Elliot and George seemingly lost in the young hip lives of his new flat mates.

What we experience is the way that various types of love – romantic, aesthetic, family, and social can work in strange and surprising ways. While the film centres on Ben's and George's relationship, other people's relationships become strained as well. One of the most conflicted people in the film is Joey, who must deal with his uncle, his parents and her ambivalent relationship with his friend Vlad.

Through Joey we see something of a coming of age story as it tracks his different relationship and about how he learns to comprehend the pressures of live. Charlie Tahan who plays Joey manages to brilliantly capture the transition of the boy moving from angsty teen to young adult. Marisa Tomei and Darren Burrows, as Kate and Elliot, convey all the tensions of family life without having to resort to overemotional acting.

There is a subtlety to the way in which they develop and project their relationship. John Lithgow (Ben) and Alfred Molina (George) provide an equally subtle exploration of their relationship with understated poignancy, desperation and expressions of love. The film has a brilliant sound track mainly of piano works of Chopin and at one point the Chopin music morphs into a scene of a young girl, a pupil of George playing the same piece.

The music manages provide an emotional parallel to the real world capturing the intensity, the pleasures and the disappointments of this modern day love story.