Doomed Romance: Heartbreak At The Movies

by Liam Horgan.

Banner by Liam Horgan.

“For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

This is the last line of Shakespeare’s infamous tragedy. Well known amongst many, Romeo and Juliet is the quintessential doomed romance. It is one we’re aware of from a very young age. Indeed, Romeo and Juliet is a part of a collection of stories beloved globally for their doomed romance plots. Historically these tales have always been with us. Preceding Shakespeare there’s Deirdre and Naoise from Irish Mythology, Orpheus and Eurydice from Greek Mythology and The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl from China. So it’s clear we’ve always had a fascination with the concept of star-crossed lovers. Cinematically doomed romance stories are just as historically recurring. Whether it’s Bogart and Bergman, Cheung and Leung or Gyllenhaal and Ledger, the depiction of a love gone wrong has permeated cinematic storytelling. There’s something about these tales that speak to audiences. Film is an inherently emotional medium. The combination of sound and images coalesces to elicit a response from the viewer, from terror to joy and every other emotion in between films have always demanded an emotional response. 

In saying that doomed romance films elicit a response from audiences, that’s not to say that romance films in contrast don’t. Far from it. A good romance film shows a love that transcends all. From innocent first love to true love, positive romance films also have their role in society. Films like Whisper of the Heart, Amélie and classics like Singing in the Rain speak to the beauty and strength of love. Despite that, doomed romance stories still captivate and hold audiences attention, entering our pop culture lexicon and remaining for far longer than most. One of the highest grossing films of all time is a doomed romance (and no I’m not talking about Avengers: Endgame). Back in 1997, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio crushed the box office with James Cameron melo-dramatic blockbuster Titanic. Cameron’s film was such a success that it helped spur on ‘Leo-mania’, and various parodies. Titanic was such a hit that it even had an episode of MythBusters focused solely on the now infamous question of ‘could Jack and Rose both fit on the door?”. 

When they remake Titanic it’ll be Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet int he leads I guarantee.

So it’s safe to say that audiences love a good doomed romance, but why is this? Cinema is often described as a means of escape. The dark room of the theatre allows audiences for a limited amount of time to escape their daily woes and engage with stories and subjects never before seen. Surely then, based on this logic, audiences would prefer happier stories? Maybe that’s true for other genres but for romance stories, the key to success is relatability, and for most people there’s nothing more relatable than heartbreak.

Heartbreak is an awful thing. A physical manifestation of emotional stress, it’s a crushing feeling. Unfortunately heartbreak is something which the majority of us will eventually or have already gone through in our lives. Whether it's the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship or something else entirely, heartbreak is a constant. A broken heart is so synonymous with romance that medically, it is considered to be a condition. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy or Broken heart syndrome is commonly described as a physical pain in the chest or heart or stomach area, caused by emotional stress of a traumatic breakup or the death of a loved one. In Shakespeare’s aforementioned tragedy, Romeo’s mother Lady Montague dies of a broken heart after banishing her son. Indeed, there are Sumerian poems which give reference to the broken hearted: “May Inana [Ancient mesopotamia love goddess] pour oil on my heart that aches”. 

Such is the nature of a doomed romance that heartbreak logically features, it’s here that the relatability comes in. As previously mentioned, audiences love a good love story but often the saccharine nature of ‘true-love’ can be a foreign concept. That's not to say that true love doesn’t exist, rather it’s more that this can be a concept which not many audiences have experienced (not yet anyways!). We all love Disney films and their fairy-tale endings but often they can be too fantastical. In opposition to this, doomed romance stories often focus on realism and relatability. They’re often a snapshot of a relationship. Blue Valentine employs a non-linear narrative to show Cindy and Dean’s failing relationship, while in Casablanca, Rick’s present situation causes him to reflect on his failed relationship with Ilsa.

There are many doomed romance stories that have stayed with audiences throughout the decades , but personally for me these are three noteworthy ones from this century. These stories are Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love ( Fa yeung nin wa) and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu). These films have noteworthy sequences or plots which truly take the concept of a doomed romance to great heights in order to elicit a crushing blow to audiences. 

The ending of La La Land.

Firstly, Chazelle’s ode to Hollywood musicals of old, La La Land depicts the relationship between Sebastian and Mia as they navigate their romance while trying to accomplish their respective dreams. The most noteworthy aspect of Chazelle’s film is the much discussed ending. Here Chazelle teases the audience with what could have been. As Mia sits with her husband and watches Sebastian play at his club, the pair imagine what their lives could have been had they stayed together. In a sequence full of technicolour wonder, super-8 footage and moments of joy, we see Mia and Seabstian’s happy lives together. The nearly 10 minute long sequence ends where it started, back in reality with Sebastian and Mia apart. Cleverly, Chazelle shows in this sequence the compromise the pair would have made, Mia has a slightly smaller house, they go to a club which is not owned by Sebastian. The message is clear, the pair put their dreams first and their romance second. 

The heartbreaking ending to Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Similarly, French filmmaker Céline Sciamma delivers a heartbreaking romance in her Queer Palm-winning Portait of a Lady on Fire. Depicting the relationship between painter Marianne and her subject Héloïse, Sciamma’s film is a tender look at love between two women away from the world of men. The love the pair shared was always doomed to begin with. While the pair never reunite, Sciamma shows in the film’s climax that their love never faded. Marianne has depicted Héloïse in the eponymous portrait. For her part, Héloïse is shown to still love Marianne through a portrait at an art exhibition, where Héloïse is holding a book showing only the edge of page 28 (the page which shows Marianne’s portrait). The pair's love is a secret between them and only them, and while their lives dictate they remain apart, their love never diminishes. Unlike similar lesbian period pieces, what makes Sciamma’s work distinct is that the pair’s relationship is not ended by death or male interference, rather it ends because they know and choose to end it, their stations dictating so.

The ending of In the Mood for Love.

In contrast to La La Land and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love shows a relationship that never occurs yet defines the film. Telling the tale of Su and Chow, the Hong Kong-set film details the growing love between the individuals who realise their spouses are sleeping with each other. Unlike their adulterous partners, Su and Chow never cross a physical boundary. A tale of missed chances and fleeting moments, Kar-wai’s film is utterly heartbreaking in every aspect. What’s significant about In the Mood for Love is how it develops the romance between the pair. It’s not through open gestures of love but through intimate mundane moments that their love develops. Bonding over shared adultery develops into similar interests, and from that, into a shared romance which is never acted upon. The closest the film comes to traversing this ground is when Chow leaves for Singapore. Chow asks Su to accompany him. Initially wary, Su eventually heads for their agreed meeting place only to find out she was too late. What’s so brutal about Kar-wai’s film isn’t any breakdown of a relationship, rather it’s the lack of one. Missed opportunities and unspoken truths become a weight which threatens to consume the viewer and even our protagonists. Ultimately the film ends with Chow re-creating a moment from a story he tells a friend. Chow previously mentions that in older times, when a person had a secret that could not be shared, they would go to a mountaintop, make a hollow in a tree, whisper the secret into said hollow and cover it. Kar-wai ends his film with just that. We never hear what Chow has to say, because we don’t need to. We know what his secret is about, having just watched it unfold on screen.

The reason these three films have stuck with audiences for their doomed romances is due in part to the filmmakers’ understanding of the said romances. Both Sciamma and Chazelle show their understanding of a finality to a relationship, with both couples separating in part due to their positions in life. The same could be said for Kar-wai’s film, but In the Mood for Love has the extra aspect of the romance never truly blossoming to begin with. These stories are only some of many stories that deal with this subject matter. It’s clear that when it comes to romance, audiences have a preference for relatability and in many ways; pathos. In watching a doomed romance, as heartbreaking as it can be to watch, there is a sense of relief and understanding from those who have gone through something similar. This common-ground is something which helps to imprint those storylines in the audience's mind, ensuring the romances live on in our minds long after they’ve ended. As Romeo states: 

“Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.”