Film and the Body——The Disintegration of the Soulmate Imagination

Film and the Body——The Disintegration of the Soulmate Imagination

What do we think of when we think of true love? Many people will immediately think of Jack saying "You jump, I jump" to Rose (Titanic, 1997), think of Bonnie and Clyde's faces before they were shot, think of Joe Bradley's eyes staring at Princess Ann(Roman Holiday, 1953)...it was the cinema screen that froze these scenes, the appearance of these lovers, and their undying love. Love in the sense of these classical tragedies is so intoxicating and soul-stirring -- time condenses love, and death sublimates it. Watching these movies is like drinking vodka, strong and dizzying. However, as busy modern life gradually integrates everyone into the huge capitalist production network, we have to fight against time in ordinary daily life, our urgent need for more real and ordinary love themes is becoming increasingly strong. The lovers' vows to live and die together have gradually become less attractive - they have gradually retreated to the stage of history and become the ancient myth of the lost classical romanticism.

So what should real and ordinary love be like? In the past, the movie "Before Sunrise" would first come to my mind, with all the scenes of Ethan Hawk and Julie Delpy meeting and flirting. In just 101 minutes, it actually contained all my imagination of love. Starting from the mysterious attraction of "love at first sight", to "crossing the line" that only movie characters dare to do: bravely inviting another stranger of the opposite sex to travel to Paris with him, to becoming infatuated and sparking love, to kissing and making love, Say goodbye at the end and make a promise to see you again. In the film's extensive game of thoughts and souls, they gradually get closer to each other, and the attributes of spiritually congenial "soul mates" seem to overshadow physical intimacy -- we watch them walking side by side along the Seine River, and then they met a third person who claimed to be a psychic. A string of words came out of their lips, which makes them look like close friends who had known each other for a long time. They exchanged everything with each other peacefully and happily, from the world view to dreams, from daily trivial matters to the concept of love. We also see that Céline is hesitant about accepting Jesse's caress -- she says she doesn't want to be a one-night-stand partner that men can brag about. Also about encounters between lovers, we cannot see the solid hugs and close-ups of hands like in Robert Bresson's "Four Nights of a Dreamer" because in "Before Sunrise", the body seems to be just a container that carries the spirit. Ethan Hawk's body and Julie Delpy's body "play" a pair of soulmates.

For a long time, I have been looking forward to this kind of love, elevating deep spiritual communication to a very high position. Correspondingly, I regard sexual desire as a dirty animal desire -- something that should be controlled and overcome. At the same time, I also despise those relationships driven by desire, such as hookups and one-night stands, which are all superficial sexual expressions. I firmly believe that lovers should first be soulmates, just like in "Before Sunrise". Like a rigid Christian, I set a strict order for verbal communication, holding hands, cuddling, kissing, and making love. In any case, physical communication must be ranked behind spiritual communication.

At that time, I simply equated love with the sublimation of friendship, and never really thought about the complexity of eros. As a queer woman, Julie Delpy has been my unshakable ideal type for a long time, carrying all my imagination of "eternal feminine"1. Until I saw "Blue Is the Warmest Color", In the bold, detailed and even somewhat lengthy three sex scenes choreographed by Abdellatif Kechiche, and in the display of desire in Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux's utmost caressing, I saw a kind of transcendence beyond language and beyond symbology. The possibility of physical communication, body and movement, constitute a solid physical presence, which also makes Emma's final words to Adele, "I will always have infinite tenderness for you," extremely firm and credible. The same example appears in another lesbian movie "Room in Rome", Alba (Elena Anaya), a Spanish mother of two children, and Natacha (Natasha Yarovenko), a Russian girl who is about to get married in a week, meet in Rome, the capital of Italy. The Eros's arrow shot at them from the sky, and desire opened up an ambiguous and interesting moment for them. The concealment and defensiveness of the two when they first met gradually dissolved in the physical blending. The two women's minds merged in this way, in such a cool early summer. A 12-hour erotic feast lasted through the night until dawn, and the secrets of two women bloomed in a Roman room. It was such a "superficial" one-night stand that allowed me to see the development of deep, profound and intense love like never before. When Sunrise comes, the morning light indicates that they are about to separate from each other. As they leave the room hand in hand, their loosened fingers are like tearing open the movie curtain, and then sadness and naked reality pour in. They are just bodies that are forced to separate. The sadness at this moment is worth a thousand words, love is like the crystal that separates from murky liquid, and we get a glimpse of its form through the bodies of the two actresses.

"...because beneath it you feel/pure duration. So that you promise eternity/almost, from the embrace."2 Physical communication is not completely equivalent to sex. Sometimes I look forward to an eternal cuddle. The young men and women in Chantal Akerman's "A whole night" stagger and flutter in the dark night, throwing themselves into each other's arms, also full of love. Another interesting example is Johnnie To's movies. The exaggerated and playful body movements of the actors and actresses are swayed along with the shaky wide-angle shots commonly used in Hong Kong comedies ("Love On A Diet" and "My Left Eye Sees Ghosts"), creating a unique cinematic body. It is in this playful attitude that the true nature of sex and love gradually emerges from the water, like dewdrops shaking off the leaves of grass and trees in the morning.

It is these movies, and the bodies of the lovers in these movies, that tell me the fact that in the face of chaotic and impulsive emotions, the body is more credible than words. So my view of love was reversed, and I began to abandon the stereotype of mind-body dualism. I began to believe that the silent physical touch is sometimes more powerful than the comfort of words. As Rilke wrote in the third elegy of the Duino Elegy: "when we love, an ancient/sap rises in our arms"3. For me, love no longer symbolizes the imagination of the unity of souls, but has a certain presentity, which allows me to enjoy every real and physical moment and believe that the moment is eternity.

Notes:

1. The eternal feminine, a concept first introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the end of his play Faust (1832), is a transcendental ideality of the feminine or womanly abstracted from the attributes, traits and behaviors of a large number of women and female figures.
2. Duino Elegies: The Second Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. S. Kline
3. Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy,Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. S. Kline

write by TouMingCabinet