The Valentine roses soon fade but the poet's words linger: 'No thorns go as deep as a rose's, and love is more cruel than lust.' One of the most wrenching cinema moments is in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is told by an old woman in the street that 'love fades'. The same cinema that has glorified love, has also given us haunting evocations of its pain and excesses. These have been captured in several video/laser releases.
CRAZY LOVE (video, 83 minutes, 1988, English subtitles).
NEXT time you are trying to name four famous Belgians, remember the director Dominique Deruddere because this movie is mordantly brilliant. He has linked three short stories by the bucolic writer, Charles Bukowski, into a progressive narrative about a young boy's passage from romantic notions of love to agonising disillusion. Crazy Love is a much stronger film than the other Bukowski inspired films - Barfly and Tales Of Ordinary Madness.
In part one, young Harry is in love with a film star's glossy picture and is waiting to kiss a princess in a white dress. An older boy introduces him to lust's sweating realities, shows him toads mating and at the fairground and tries to find a girl for him 'to get off with'. Too soon, he discovers the tribulations of love and is farcically thrown off an older woman he creeps up on. Disappointed, he masturbates over his romantic picture as the rain streaks the grimy window. Love's young dream is shattered.
We move on seven years, and adolescent Harry is plagued with diabolical acne. His fumbling, embarrassed gropings with love are cruelly spurned. In an excruciating but exquisite sequence, he turns up at a ball with his face bandaged in toilet paper - a bestial prince charming.
Fourteen years later, he is a middle-aged drunk and love has eluded him. In this degraded state, he enacts a shocking love scene inverting the lovers' promise of 'death do us part'. The death of love is paraded as a macabre triumph - dead horrible but deadly accurate.
THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (video, 108 minutes, 1969) IF this was the honeymoon, it's a relief we didn't see the marriage. Opera composer Leonard Kastle directed this cult favourite and true story of the notorious Lonely Hearts killers of the 1940s. An atmospheric account of the bizarre, ill-matched relationship between suave, Latin con-man (Tony Lo Bianco) and his 91 kilogram lover-cum-accomplice (Shirley Stoler), The Honeymoon Killers is a small classic.