From Ghost to Your Name, 5 top movies about true loves separated for a Covid-19 Valentine’s Day
- Ghost is a romantic classic from the 1990s, Il Mare proves to be a memorable Korean fantasy, and Your Name features dazzling photorealistic animation
- Sleepless in Seattle reunites Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while Atonement starring James McAvoy is a visually sumptuous drama
This Valentine’s Day is going to be an unusual one for many couples, separated by the pandemic and unable to go out and celebrate. These five favourite movies of ours all feature lovers separated by space and time.
1. Ghost (1990)
In one of the most enduringly popular films of the 1990s, not even death can keep Sam (Patrick Swayze) and his girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore) apart. After he is killed in a mugging gone wrong, Sam reaches out from beyond the grave to avenge his own death and protect the woman he loves.
To do so, he calls upon the help of Oda Mae Brown (an Oscar-winning Whoopi Goldberg), a phoney psychic whose efforts to contact the dead had been a scam until Sam invades her head space, and at one point, her body too.
What unfolds is cinematic lightning-in-a-bottle, as director Jerry Zucker and writer Bruce Joel Rubin (whose screenplay also won an Oscar) somehow manage to steer their fantasy-romance-comedy-horror-thriller to major box office success, all while simultaneously introducing the Righteous Brothers to a new generation, inspiring women to adopt Moore’s “boy cut” hairstyle and reinventing the pottery wheel as a powerful tool of seduction.
2. Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
A reporter hears a voice on the radio and becomes obsessed. That could be the premise for a creepy stalker thriller, but is also the idea behind Nora Ephron’s 1993 romantic comedy.
Tom Hanks plays the recently widowed Sam, who moves with his eight-year-old son from Chicago to Seattle but struggles to get over the loss of his wife. When his son calls a local radio station and forces his dad onto the air, Sam lets it all pour out, and in doing so, captures the hearts of women across America.
Among these is Meg Ryan’s Baltimore journalist, Annie, who despite being engaged to Bill Pullman’s uptight Walter, writes to Sam.
The best of Hanks and Ryan’s four on-screen collaborations, and the film that cemented their reputation as one of Hollywood’s golden screen couples, Sleepless in Seattle found a perfect balance between implausible contrivance and romantic fantasy, even going so far as to acknowledge its detachment from reality by openly lifting its climax from ’50s classic An Affair to Remember.
3. Il Mare (2000)
Widely dismissed on its initial release, Lee Hyun-seung’s romantic fantasy has only gained in stature as the years go by, and 20 years later is regarded as one of the greatest Korean romances of all time.