The second film of the American director Derek Cianfrance disglages six years of a couple, interpreted by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling.
by
In the center of Blue Valentine, six years ago: an obscure abyss we will not see. The film by Derek Cianfrance only shows the birth and agony of the wedding of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams). Six years later, they are always beautiful, even if his features he had harden herself, even if his temples were disintegrating. But they no longer irradicate the desire and joy that illuminated each of their meetings, initially. A sort of natural disaster in love, rendered in the least of its details with meticulousness and violence.
Dean, a pretty boy from New York neighborhoods, gifted for music, which has just embarked on the career of movers. Cindy, a brilliant girl with destructive inclinations, a star in her high school in Pennsylvania. She could have been a doctor, she is nursing. From the first sequences, we know that six years later, they will be married, will have a girl, will be installed in a small house at the end of the Pennsylvania.
Inconsolable regrets
The scenario is made of the nesting of these nuptial parade moments filmed throughout their gauchery and their spontaneity, and the story of a clearable weekend during which Dean tries to revive the fires of love by taking Cindy up to a motel love, in which he chose the Science Fiction Chamber.
Derek Cianfrance, who signs here his second feature film, had to use ordinary film devices, makeup, actors of a rare intelligence and a change of support each time we pass from a Period to another: 16 mm film for the past and digital image for the present. The young filmmaker uses these processes with a great sagacity: the slightest decor element (the movers’ workshop, the inside cindy family disaster) comes to expand the portrait of the main characters.
The second roles are directed with the same care, while being vigorously confined to their place of contributors to the saga of Dean and Cindy. The electric melancholy of Grizzly Bear’s songs that the soundtrack is finished installing this atmosphere of inconsolable regrets.
Ryan Gosling is a saving (his performance in Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn, “said Steve McQueen), Michelle Williams an extreme actress who uses his kind physique, almost anywhere, to take the viewer into the viewer. the most disturbing corners of the psyche of his character.
In the United States, Blue Valentine failed to be forbidden at the age of 17 (a classification as infamous as the French X). It suffices for a little European sufficiency to say that by strength of sweet romantic Americans have taken the faithful reflection of their intimate lives for pornography.