Valentine’s Day. A time of love and romance and passion and sentiment. Not bad for a holiday that’s a Christianized version of a Roman festival that exists for the benefit of greeting card companies and florists.

Please understand—I come to praise Valentine’s Day, not bury it. This commercialized version of a Christianized Pagan love feast really acts as a place for our culture to put our considerable interest in love romantic, erotic, philial and unconditional. I for one rather enjoy that.

Another place where our culture puts its considerable interest in all the different forms of love is the movies. Love has been one of the primary forms of subject matter for film since penny arcades showed movieolas of chaste first kisses. To that end, I thought I would share, in honour of our favourite artificial day about love, five films about love, romance and relationships.

Far From Heaven

Director Todd Haynes’ sets out with this 2002 film to emulate the weepy 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk but in the end he comes up with a film that is more than genre pastiche and is deeply moving in its own right. Julianne Moore plays Cathy Whitaker, a 1950s housewife with the beautiful Connecticut home, good kids, loving husband and all the benefits of middle class existence—which is, of course, all a lie. Her husband turns out to be gay and the bucholic community she lives in turns ugly when she befriends and quietly falls in love with her gardener, Raymond, played by Dennis Haysbert. It’s beautiful watching these two people become vulnerable with each other and it makes the inevitable tragedy of their love all the more heartbreaking.

[Sorry, embedding disabled. Please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKiPIoLFi9s]

In the grand tradition of Douglas Sirk, almost no one comes away happy. the only exception is Dennis Quaid’s husband, Frank, who decides to move in with his gay lover (albeit almost certainly closeted). The real tragedy of Far From Heaven is that Cathy and Raymond are victims of the age they live in; if they just lived even seven years later, things would have been different. But that’s the tragedy of romance—sometimes, as right as it is, the timing is all wrong.

Domicile Conjugal (AKA Bed and Board)

During the 1960s and 1970s, French director François Truffaut made four feature films featuring the character that was, in many ways, Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel (played brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Leaud). This 1970 film, the third in that sequence, finds Antoine adjusting to married life with his wife Christine (Claude Jade). Ostensibly a comedy, this film brilliantly captures the slightly crazed chaos of marriage—the little struggles, victories, arguments, clashes of personality, heartbreaks and joys that punctuate domestic life.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgcOQIkjSw4]

Antoine is a selfish man-child who chooses the name of his child against Christine’s wishes and ultimately cheats on her with a Japanese visitor at work. Christine, though, is also in many ways a little girl—proper to the point of inflexibility, petulant and naïve. Ultimately, Domicile Conjugal is about how both Antoine and Christine grow up, something demonstrated in the best, most heartbreaking scene in the film. Antoine, now separated from Christine, walks her to a cab and says—with typical self-importance—“You are my sister, my daughter, my mother.” Christine replies, sadly, “I had hoped to be your wife.”

City Lights

If you want a sweet, sentimental, chaste love story with a powerful payoff, then City Lights is your film. While made in the era of talkies, 1931, it’s a silent film written, directed and starring Charlie Chaplin, playing his famous tramp. In it, the tramp encounters a blind woman (a sensational performance by Virginia Cherrill) that he falls in love with. The problem is the blind woman thinks the tramp is a millionaire. The tramp is able to sustain this illusion for a while thanks to his friendship with a dipsomaniacal rich man (who forgets it every time he sobers up). Unfortunately, the tramp’s luck runs out and the tramp becomes desperate to find the money to pay for her family’s rent before they are evicted and pay for a cure for her blindness. After several very funny misadventures, he succeeds, but he is arrested and imprisoned. At the end of the film, the girl, now able to see, works in a flower shop still seeking her rich benefactor. She encounters the tramp, now out of jail and even more pathetic, and in what must be one of the most moving scenes in film history she discovers the truth. It’s incredible.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpghUlfUzmQ&feature=related]

Annie Hall

No film has gotten closer to the sheer absurdity of a relationship than Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall. Allen explores, then explodes, the idea that two people with all their neuroses, foibles and opinions can co-exist as a couple by hooking up Allen’s Alvy Singer and Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall. Separately, Alvy and Annie have enough baggage to keep Samsonite employed for months. Together, it’s by turns hilarious and sad watching the two of them negotiate their communal existence.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQMjrGnGHDY&feature=related]

The thing is, Alvy and Annie make each other crazy, but they also make each other better people: Annie becomes more confident and Alvy actually finds himself capable of enjoying himself. But even that has unexpected consequences. No film has captured the messiness and chaos of a relationship better. As Alvy observes at the end, we still need the eggs.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-M3Q2zhGd4&feature=related]

Casablanca

Choosing Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca (1942) seems like a safe choice for a list like this, much like picking Citizen Kane as the best film ever made. But the most amazing thing about Casablanca is that it isn’t safe. Scratch away the veneer of a World War II-era drama and you have a surprisingly mature film about a woman who is in love with two men—and she needs one man to help the other. It’s possibly the most powerful catalyst for drama ever invented.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AecFNgNW0c]

The ending may be the greatest romantic gesture ever offered in the movies. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick has been a model of aloof detachment, refusing to stick his neck out for anyone as his revenge on the world for Ilsa abandoning him. When he finally does stick out his neck, it’s a gesture to take away Ilsa’s own dilemma, by sending her away with Victor Lazlo and lying to him about what happened between them. And in doing that, Rick gains back something he had lost—his own passion for living, his own desire to take a side in a conflict against the little guy. Even though it breaks his own heart to do it.

I was once at a Valentine’s themed party where we were supposed to show the most romantic scene in a movie. The rest of the crowd showed scenes from Titanic and similar mushy scenes. But that’s not love. That’s just sentiment. Casablanca is the real thing. Here’s looking at you, kid.

[See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYLatxs1RP8]

(Honorable Mention goes to Bernardo Bertolucci 1998 film Besieged with David Thewlis and Thandie Newton—a film that shows love in all its forms—passion, obsession, sacrifice, compassion—that sadly doesn’t have a decent YouTube clip. But go see it anyway!)