We all look for love like the love in Deja Vu. We hardly ever find it. That's why there are movies. We want a love that spans the generations and conquers time, a love so large that only the supernatural can contain it. Here is a movie about a love like that. It makes City of Angels look timid.The story involves an American woman named Dana Howard (played by Victoria Foyt), who is on a buying trip to Jerusalem when she is approached by a mysterious older blond woman (played by Aviva Marks) who engages her in conversation. Soon she is revealing all her secrets: Yes, she is engaged, because being engaged has become a condition of my life, but after six years and no marriage she is not very happy.
The other woman tells her about the love of her life. It was a wartime romance. She was a French Jewish girl, not even twenty, he was an American GI. They planned to wed. He went home to tell his girlfriend, and never returned. Eventually she got a letter with a photo of his first child.
Perhaps, Dana says, he could not find you. The woman smiles sadly. He knew where to find me. Life had got hold of us. She pauses. Nothing seemed so real again. In fact, all my life since then has been like a dream. The woman gives her a piece of jewelry -- a gold clip in the shape of a leaf, with inlaid rubies -- and disappears, after mentioning that the clip was a gift from the GI, who had had them custom made in Paris and had kept the other one.
Dana heads toward home. When the Chunnel train stops briefly at Dover, she inexplicably gets off instead of going on to London. Above the White Cliffs of Dover, she meets a painter named Sean Elias (played by Stephen Dillane). Have we met before? she asks him. He says, It feels like one of those moments where if you turn the wrong way you regret it forever. It's love at first sight, but they fight it. She's engaged, after all. But then they meet again, by coincidence, at the house of British friends. She discovers that he is married.
Dana's fiancé is Alex (played by Michael Brandon). Sean's wife is Claire (played by Glynis Barber). It becomes clear that Dana and Sean are hopelessly in love, and their partners react in disbelief and anger, but with a certain civilized restraint. Without revealing any more we can say that old songs, such as The White Cliffs of Dover, These Foolish Things, and Where or When are like time machines that can carry love down through the years and can leap from mind to mind, spreading their foolishness and dreams.
Deja Vu is not a weepy romantic melodrama, but a sophisticated film about smart people. Foyt and Dillane make convincing lovers not because they are swept away, but because they regard what has happened to them, and accept it. When they fall in love, there is a lot at risk: jobs, businesses, which country they live in, the people they're committed to. It takes no trouble at all to fall in love when you're 20 and single. But Dana and Sean must look in their hearts and be sure they cannot live without one another.
The film was directed by Henry Jaglom, and written by Jaglom and his star, Victoria Foyt, who is also his wife. Ah-ha, you think, guessing the connection, especially since the movie is dedicated to the love of my life. But there is another connection coiling down through the years. The trademark of Jaglom's film company is a brief moment of time, showing Orson Welles producing a rainbow out of thin air. Jaglom was one of Welles' close confidantes and friends.
In Citizen Kane, which Welles made in 1941, there occurs my favorite passage of movie dialogue. Old Mr. Bernstein is talking about the peculiarities of time. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember, he says. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.
Yes. And can you, dear reader, think of such a moment, too? Perfect love is almost always unrealized. It has to be. What makes those memories perfect is that they produce no history. The woman with the white parasol remains always frozen in an old man's memory. She never grows old, is never out of temper, never loses interest in him, never dies. She exists forever as a promise, like the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier.
Only rarely does the universe wheel around to bring two hearts once again into communion. That's what Deja Vu is about. And that explains the two most curious characters in it. They are the old couple (played by Anna Massey and Noel Harrison) who own the house where Dana and Sean meet by accident. They have been married a very long time, and like to read in bed, and eat Mars bars at the same time, and be happy to be together. At first you wonder what their scenes mean. Then you understand.
Blogger's comment: Deja Vu is a tender, thought-provoking love story for anyone who has ever believed, even for a moment, that they have a soulmate. If the expressions meant for each other and destined to be together cause you to pause and wonder, then this film is for you. If romantic dramas like Somewhere in Time (1980), Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The Love Letter (1998) and The Lake House (2006) are your favorite kind of films, then you will appreciate Deja Vu.
As I was writing my romantic drama Sarah and David: The Sequel, as the sequel to Every Time We Say Goodbye, I realized that I needed an argument for David to convince Sarah to marry him for love. I found it in Deja Vu, in the beautiful quotation by Soren Kierkegaard: To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
Labels: drama, romance, rom-drama-faves, space-time
IMDb 67/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=60, viewers=70)
SPOILERS: Some viewers may feel that the film is very slow and, at 1:57 it is too long and could easily have been cut by ten minutes with no loss. So I will tell you how it ends.
Dana tells Alex that she has fallen in love with Sean and cannot marry him. Sean tells his wife Claire the same thing. You can imagine the scenes that follow. In the middle of all this, Dana gets a call from her mother in Los Angeles that her father has had a heart attack.
So, Dana and Alex fly to L.A., her father is fine, she comes to her senses and decides to marry Alex. As a wedding gift her father gives Dana - you guessed it - the matching gold and ruby leaf clip.
To his utter disbelief, Dana tells him she knows the story. She begs him to tell her - did he really love the girl he made the clip for. Chagrinned he tells Dana it was a very long time ago, but a week hasn't gone by since I last saw her that I haven't thought of her. She was the love of my life.
You know what happens. Dana flies back to London and reunites with Sean in his studio. And on the easel she sees a painting of the woman she had met in Jerusalem, younger, but the same woman. And she is wearing both gold and ruby leaf clips. She tells Sean that's the woman she had met in Jerusalem. She was the reason Dana got off the train in Dover and met Sean. Sean tells her that the woman was his mother but that she has been dead for fifteen years.
The very last scene in the film shows Sean and Dana in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. It's the modern version of the painting Dana had first seen in Sean's studio and he had given to her. Here are the two images side-by-side, the current one (left) and the painting. And the song playing in the background is the Rogers & Hart classic Where or When sung by Lena Horne.
The assumption is that Dana and Sean are soulmates and are the reincarnations of the two people in the painting. If we assume that the painting was a scene in 1920 and the two people had been born, say, in 1870, they would have been about fifty. If they had lived to be eighty, they would have passed away around 1950, and they could have been born again around 1960, so they would have been in their late thirties when the film was made in 1997.
No comments:
Post a Comment