In 2022 I signed up for a Mubi film membership in order to watch a movie called ‘Transit‘. A year passed and I still couldn’t view that movie as it never became available. Sadly, that was part of the reason why I had to cancel my membership in November of 2023, but before I did that I watched 3 love stories which were intense, surprising and beautifully acted. The people at Mubi recently reminded me of theses movies in an email retrospective. Clicking through their list I was impressed by the fact that I seemed to have forgotten about these 3 movies, deemed as ’emotional’ watches. It may well be that my brain is shielding me from deep emotional memories to protect me from an emotional breakdown, as 2023 was an outwardly successful yet inwardly harrowing year for me. I lost contact with two high-school friends, I lost a relationship with someone who was romantically promising, and I realized just how doomed a reconciliation with my sister is. I spent most of 2023, alone and having random, spontaneous arguments with neighbors and the rough & violent people in the community I just moved into. As a consequence I developed physical issues and a constant pain running through my body. To calm my nerves, I worked, listened to music and watched movies. So let’s talk about these movies, and what I especially enjoyed about them.

The first movie I watched back in May was The Fire (El Incendio), a 2015 Argentinian movie about the suffocating intimate life of a couple who decide to buy a house together. Their plans to acquire the house in the same day when the movie begins are slightly thwarted and they have to wait to complete the transaction. What follows is a couple of days of intense pressure, in which their class and gender dynamics are intertwined with their intimate breakdown: Marcelo is the wealthier one of the two, works a more relaxed job and is still emotionally supported by his relatives, while Lucia comes from a poorer family, works an intense job in a restaurant and has a difficult connection to her estranged mother. Paradoxically, and as the movie slowly reveals, despite the fact that Lucia is disadvantaged in every way in this relationship, she is the strong core of their relationship, holding it together even as Marcelo begins to fall apart.

The problem is what happens to them once the transaction is complete and they finally get the key to their house, which is a stylish new-build, situated at the basement level of a building? I’m not going to tell you what happens, because the movie has a powerful psychological ending, but I need to say that this movie offers some of the most intense and passionate couple of performances I have seen in a while. The screen was literally electrified by their arguments, love-making and inevitable moments of deep powerlessness and vulnerability. This movie certainly deserves more attention as it has two highly underrated performances from Pilar Gamboa & Juan Barberini, but it is clearly not something for those weak of heart who are triggered by raised voices. A movie that gets you to truly think about the meaning of ‘toxic love’.

The second movie I watched in July, was 10,000 km, a 2014 Spanish movie about two lovers who are forced by circumstances to have a long-distance relationship for the span of one year. Natalia Tena plays Alexandra, an artist who receives the chance of her lifetime to create some artwork in Los Angeles. Supportive of her dreams, her boyfriend Sergio initially urges her to go. But as time passes they get increasingly frustrated with not being able to have a physically intimate connection and they begin to emotionally unravel, as the longing to be together becomes too intense & Skype doesn’t help to keep them together. The movie felt strangely personal to me, as I also had a year of a long-distance relationship with my ex-husband when we met back in 2007. That year eventually ended with me travelling to Germany to move in with him, as I had just completed my degree and he was continuing his teacher-training. So for us, the technology really helped to keep us together especially as neither of us came from wealthy families and travelling often would not have been economically possible for us. But this movie seems to portray a different and (I felt) more traditional understanding of love being broken apart by distance, professional goals and technological detachment, which is something I don’t necessarily agree with.

The emotional problem that the movie posed is that only one of the two lovers sees this distance as something painful, while the other one relishes it, enjoying the space. So the movie keeps you watching because all you can think about during it is: ‘What happens when they come back together again, physically in the same space? Is their relationship the same? Is physicality really that important to maintain love, or are love relationships mostly lust-zones for consenting adults?’

And the third movie is probably my favorite. The reason for this being is that it was a fierce, funny and creative watch. So the final love story I saw in September is called ‘Love Steaks’, a 2014 German movie with two lesser-known actors in the leading roles of Clemens and Lara. The story begins like a dirty joke you would tell your friends: a cook and a masseur fall in love in a luxurious hotel; the rawness of love ensues, as you can’t tell if they like each other or if they want to kill one another. The movie is filled with embarrassing dialogues, in which people constantly correct each other. As I kept watching, the German word ‘peinlich’ constantly kept popping up in my mind. At some point there is a scene in which Clemens gets sexually groped by an elderly client and the scene is treated in the most hilariously painful way to watch. But the movie also shows the tender and playful side of the relationship that Lara shares with Clemens. Both of them struggle with something: Clemens is weirdly co-dependent and a little bit of a doormat, while Lara is an alcoholic who occasionally self-harms by starting arguments with people. The most shocking part of the film is definitely its ending, which I can tell you right now you won’t be able to guess. And that’s what makes the movie so charming. As soon as it ended I was tempted to re-watch it, constantly thinking ‘What the eff did I just watch?!’ It also made me laugh a lot.

As I am writing this article, I feel like my Mubi experience is coming full circle, because I just realized that the leading actor in Love Steaks, Franz Rogowski – a man whose face is something fascinating and unique to look at – is also the leading actor in ‘Transit’, the movie I initially wanted to watch on Mubi. I just checked his birthday and I can see that he is an Aquarius Sun, born on the 2nd of February 1986. With Pluto beginning to transit over his Sun from next year and for the next two decades, it will be interesting to see him rise to stardom and what other films he may play in.

Anyway, I hope you can give these three small, intimate and crazily underrated movies a try soon. And let me know what you thought about them. In the last two decades, love movies have been few and far in between and were mainly cast aside in cinema in order to promote blockbuster superhero movies. So I am actually grateful that these small love stories were created for our viewing pleasure.

In the meantime, thank you for reading my articles in 2023! I sincerely appreciate the support of each and every one of you who comes here and decides to spend time reading my thoughts, while bearing through some of my many spelling mistakes 🙂

Happy New Year and I’ll see you all in 2024!

With universal love,

Lexi