Relationships are work, or so the saying goes, but how does that effort to keep the flame burning evolve as the seasons pass? When gray hairs spread like weeds, your skin starts to wrinkle, and retirement becomes a plausible option, how do one's priorities change? More importantly, what happens when health matters threaten to derail the stability of your decades-long bond?
Film directors have mined these universal questions for content throughout the years. Two European filmmakers, ages 36 and 41, have opted to explore this territory as experienced by, respectively, a gay couple on the high end of middle age and a lesbian couple at least ten years their senior. The results have garnered some awards season traction and in one, case, prompted the country of origin to submit it as its official entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. Are these new releases worthy of their noble, challenging subject? Do they provide satisfying answers to these thorny inquiries? Let's find out.
Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci in "Supernova." Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street.
Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci in "Supernova." Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street.
"Supernova"
The camper van makes its way down the highway on a brisk fall afternoon, and the couple inside are ready for another adventure together. That is, if they can stop bickering about how helpful their robotic, veddy British satellite navigation actually is. But this isn't annoying, nails-on-a-chalkboard bickering. It's a playful routine, aimed at joshing, not exasperating, and one senses it's something they've done many, many times before.
But the loving pair at the center of "Supernova" are not just your average couple. No, not because it's two guys, and certainly not because of the effortless way they just click. It's because they're public figures, as writer-director Harry Macqueen reveals. Sam (Colin Firth) is not just a hot daddy rocking a salt-and-pepper beard. He's a renowned English pianist gearing up for his first recital in years. And Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is not just a sexy-nerdy smart aleck Yank with an impish glee behind his designer frames. He's a novelist working on his next book.
Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in "Supernova." Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street.
And, oh yes, Tusker has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
The realization, confirmed in the opening moments of this tender yet tough travelogue, casts a pall over the joy and comfort the men feel in each other's company. The film is not just set in autumn. It's autumnal inside and out: delicate and wistful, tinged with exquisite heartache yet anchored by clear-eyed wisdom.
And yet, despite tackling such downbeat subject matter, Macqueen never allows the story to wallow in despair. What's striking about his direction is the restraint he sustains throughout. This is a film of controlled performances, elegant and unfussy mise en scene, and prickly end-of-life conversations. It's a movie of subtle touches orbiting a conspicuously unsubtle metaphor. The title refers to a dying star, and how that celestial body is at its most stunning at the moment it explodes. Macqueen's screenplay handles the cumbersome motif by couching it in mundane exchanges, so even when it's at its most apparent, he largely refrains from hitting viewers over the head.
Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in "Supernova." Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street.
Macqueen is equally adept in the one-on-one scenes between Sam and Tusker as he is navigating a party thrown at the home of Lilly, Sam's sister ("Bridgerton's" Pippa Haywood). Exposition is doled out in seemingly throwaway lines of dialogue. Much like the central relationship, everything here feels lived in and genuine. Even more affecting is the actors' body language, like the way Tucci pauses in an attempt to conceal when his mind is faltering, or when Firth shuffles on, the pressure of his role as caregiver weighing down on him.
The one thing Macqueen keeps using to draw you in? In a word, intimacy. He keeps the camera close, for instance, when the characters are settling in for the night. When they kiss, it's with a mix of familiarity and awkwardness. One feels they've done it so often and for so long that the show of affection is secondary to the bond that radiates off the screen like an aura.
Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci in "Supernova." Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street.
Firth and Tucci's chemistry is a good thing, because "Supernova" is harboring a dark secret regarding Tusker's reaction to his grim diagnosis. This is where the movie digs under its burnished surfaces to gnaw at a rift in the men's worldviews, and Macqueen's tight reins truly rise to the occasion. The way he resolves the couple's agonizing dilemma is deeply moving while avoiding histrionics. The answers he gives are not easy to hear, but they make every tear this weepie wrings feel fully earned. Honesty is the best policy in any relationship, the filmmaker argues, even if it hurts. Even if you risk disappearing into a void as black and vast as outer space.
Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa in "Two of Us," a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
"Two of Us"
Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa in "Two of Us," a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Honesty could have made things a lot easier for Nina and Madeleine, the couple of a certain age that keep things on the down-low in this co-production between France, Belgium and Luxembourg by Italian director Filippo Meneghetti. The women, who live across from each other in an apartment building, have been carrying on a harmonious affair, unbeknownst to Madeleine's adult children. The couple is in for a rude awakening when their plans to move to Rome find themselves on a head-on collision with the widowed Madeleine's inability to confront her loved ones about her decision to move away, let alone about her significant other.
Martine Chevallier in "Two of Us," a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
What seems like a setup for a sophisticated and mature depiction of commitment and the passage of time is unfortunately trapped in the confines of a rudimentary and basic coming out story that should have ripped the Band-Aid from the get-go. Meneghetti, making his feature debut, appears to have little use for stimulating discussions about the decisions that have led Nina (Barbara Sukowa) and Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) to their current predicament. Instead, we're subjected to scenes that attempt to generate suspense out of the prospect of Madeleine's family catching Nina in her girlfriend's apartment. (Think of that scene in Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" where Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning hold their breaths and hide from the hostile aliens.) Any thoughtful dialogue about the women's shared experiences? Nope, just coy hinting and the expected accusations of cowardice that lay the foundation for the creaky plot to churn out one cliché after another. The prehistoric approach would have felt past its expiration date twenty years ago.
Barbara Sukowa in "Two of Us," a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Shot predominantly on southern France's Mediterranean coast, the film also strikes a parallel between the main characters and its picturesque but somber setting. Meneghetti appears to show the imposing Pont du Gard in Nîmes to convey an imminent transition, a harbinger of a seismic change in store for the furtive couple.
A medical emergency leaves Madeleine in need of round-the-clock supervision, prompting her beautician daughter Anne (Léa Drucker) to hire a live-in nurse (Muriel Bénazéraf) who is there just to show how much better Nina, a German transplant, is at caring for the patient.
It's emblematic of the way Meneghetti is willing to throw his characters under the bus, whether it's the astonishingly clueless Anne or her selfish brother Frédéric (Jérôme Varanfrain), whose resentment toward his mother could have been conveyed with considerably more nuance. But the characters are too thinly drawn for them to be compelling. They're signposts in the film's trajectory, which sees the filmmaker alternating between self-consciously arty flourishes and clumsy story beats. The lackluster results, France's Oscar submission, amount to foreign movie night for Granny, a geriatric romance doused in formaldehyde.
Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa in "Two of Us," a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In the film's binary terms, Nina's selfless actions are depicted as a heroic rebuke to those surrounding Madeleine, because no sacrifice is too great if it means being with the love of her life. But Nina spends too much of the film's running time suffering in silence. Her devotion, rather than provide a window into the specificity of her bond with Madeleine, reduces the character to a strong-willed doormat. She's flattened into an engine propelling "Two of Us" to its inevitable showdown. Meneghetti aims for liberating release, but he never reaches the desired catharsis, because his stale nag of a movie is hopelessly stuck in the past.
- "Supernova" is now playing in theaters across South Florida, including Coral Gables Art Cinema, Silverspot Cinema in Downtown Miami, AMC Aventura 24 and Cinemark Paradise 24. The Bleecker Street release will be available for digital rental on Feb. 16.
- "Two of Us" is set to be released in theaters, virtual cinemas and on demand on Friday, Feb. 5.
