Coarse language and sex scenes
USA 2008
Director: James Gray
Featuring: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Moni Moshonov,
Isabella Rossellini, John Ortiz, Julie Budd, Elias Koteas
Running Time: 110 Min
In Two Lovers, a mobile phone goes off during a solemn moment at a bar mitzvah, amid some nervous and embarrassed laughter. At a hospital, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character has just had a baby, the father visits her in her room while her more recent and more infatuated lover hides behind the open door and overhears their conversation.
Will the father discover the other’s presence? Will someone blunder into the room and shut the door? It’s the sort of situation usually found in an English bedroom farce or a Mozart opera. You might imagine that Two Lovers is a romantic comedy, one of the fluffier kind, or something more raunchy and tasteless. You might be wrong. Two Lovers is the most moving and beautiful love story I have seen for a long time.
The prevailing tone is set in the opening shot. Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is a troubled young man from a New York Jewish family who works in his father’s dry-cleaning business. One day, on a delivery run near Brighton Beach, he climbs over a railing and tries to drown himself in the bay. Rescued by passers-by, he returns home drenched and apologetic to find himself at a gathering of family friends, and from snippets of conversation we learn that Leonard is bipolar. Then he meets the beautiful Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of one of his father’s business colleagues, the girl
his parents would like him to marry.
Source: Evan Williams – The Australian
Compiled by Peter Gillard