(courtesy IMDb)
Turtles (Les Tortues) is a film that sits poignantly at the far end of the spectrum of love.
While we are well used to seeing the beginning of Cupid’s journey, the road that marks the end of a grand love affair is not as well travelled, likely because while we know that all good things often come to an end, we don’t like to think about that too much.
That’s who romantic comedies outnumber divorce tales by a considerable margin and why films like Turtles are so precious and rare; we are evolutionarily predisposed to hope for and plan for and act on the best of possibilities, and concentrating on the end of the end of all things does not sit well with us as a species in love with hope, wonder and ideals.
As we meet the couple at the centre of this often emotionally dark and at times harrowing story, Englishman Thomas Halford (Dave Johns) and Belgian Henri Janssens (Oliver Gourmet), we find them struggling with latter’s retirement from the police force, a development which places significant and perhaps strain on a relationship of thirty years standing.
As Henri finds civilian life almost impossibly empty and unfulfilling, Thomas, whose source of income is selling secondhand goods at a local market with his only real friend, Jenny (Brigitte Poupart), is treated first as an irritant then an annoyance then as am existential eyesore that infuriates Henri and his slowly unravelling grip on what he wants from life.
While you hope that Thomas and Henri will find a way out from this romantic cataclysm, it looks increasingly remote that they will do so, and as Turtles moves affectingly on, you begin to realise that this is not one of those stories we love so much, the ones full of hope and reinvention and renewal.
Quite all this leads is best left to the watching but suffice to say that this is not a Meg Ryan rom-com and that Cupid won’t come riding in with a fresh batch of arrows just when they are needed most.
Still, for all the dire certainty in this film, there are moments of quite lovely beauty such as when Thomas, a drag queen who hasn’t performed in decades and who regards Madame (Vanessa Van Durme) the owner and doyenne of the local club where Thomas once strutted the stage, as a painful reminder of a life once lived and lost, rediscovers his love of drag and the raw emotionalism often inherent in the art.
As are the quiet moments between Thomas and Jenny who celebrates the former’s birthday every year and who is a calming, warming during a very difficult time.
There’s also a sense that many the rupturing of a three decade-long love affair isn’t the end of the road for Thomas and Henri but too must wait for the watching of this most emotionally honest of films.
What Turtles does quite beautifully and powerfully is take us, not to the beginning of love but to its end, or its end in the form it currently occupies anyway, and ask if anything lies beyond that, and if it does, what on earth do we do with it?
(courtesy IMDB)
Wearing its Amelie meets any number of Wes Anderson films very much on its quirkily arty sleeve, Gondola is a dialogue-free piece of whimsy, and not a little darkness for all its fey narrative sensibilities, that takes us right to the start of the journey of love.
But not perhaps the rom-com journey which Hollywood has prepared you for.
In this tale of two young gondola operators falling love from afar, the genesis of their coming together played out as they pass each other, in ever more inventive ways, up and down the mountainous region of Georgia in which the gondola lies, and where it is the main form of transportation across deep valleys of agricultural labour, we bear witness to how unorthodox love and its start can be.
The two young women, Iva (Mathilde Irrmann) who has returned home after the death of her father to much disgust from her disapproving mother (Niara Chichinadze) – you suspect something drove her way and that something gradually becomes quite evident as Gondola weaves its magically oddball way to fruition – and Nino (Nini Soselia) are both reasonably repressed sorts, which you suspect has much to do that they are outliers in a society that doesn’t easily accept deviations from the norm.
At first, even as they are in close proximity during training – Iva decides to stick around and in one of the funnier and more idiosyncratic scenes, the owner of the gondola chooses his new employee based on who will fit a small and exisiting uniform – they stay at a distance from each other.
But gradually as you see them transporting people, including a boy (Luka Tsetskladze) and a girl (Elene Shavadze) who fall in love in the most adorable sweet way possible as the film progresses, you see their attraction grow and as it does, the ever more inventive, and hilarious ways they attempt to impress the other.
We are treated to decorated gondolas meant to evoke New York City and St. Moritz, picnics in the air and orchestras high in the sky, each gesture more whimsical and yet emotionally meaningful than than last, the two would-be lovers expressing their silent love in ways that are gleefully and cutely imaginative.
There’s a certain magical realism to Gondola which variously has the villagers, who rely on the gondola for food and transport, acting as a choir and an orchestra, yes even the widow who may have relented in her stony condemnation of her daughter, and which imbues the love story of Iva and Nino with a playful joyfulness that evokes how fairytale magical falling in love can be.
While Gondola doesn’t completely knock it out of the park, it comes very, very close, giving us a clever and movingly eccentric tale of love on the rise, which makes good use of its dialogue-empty screenplay and which knows that true love, even without words, is the most potently transformative experience any of us will ever encounter.