THG 22: The Best Ever Love Story
Four more love stories in cinema plus a philosophical look at love
If you think love is a feeling beyond accurate description or debate, you are not to blame. The things that you have read or listened to about love are.
So, what is love? I’ll deal with this in the second part of this post. First, in the eve of Valentine’s day, please read about—and watch and enjoy if/when possible—these stories about love in extraordinary situations in various times and places.
Part 1: 5 best works of love stories
#5. Same-sex love: Aligarh and Fire
For me there is a tie for this spot and category between two of the finest movies to come from India over past many decades. While Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh explores the theme of gay love in conservative India, Deepa Mehta’s Fire explores lesbian love in an even more conservative setting in India.
While Aligarh is in Hindi (with English subtitles here), Fire is in English and you can watch it in youtube here.
#4. Parents-Child love: Bari Thekey Paliye or Runaway
This 1959 Bengali classic (with English subtitle here) deals with the delicate subject of a child’s relationship with his parents very sensitively.
Besides the main protagonist—a kid who runs away fearing wrath of his domineering father after a minor act of mischief—there are some other illustrative juvenile characters too: a street kid indentured by a criminal gang, a missing child and a bunch of urban kids.
The child’s proximity to the mother and his emotional distance from the father, the diverse feelings towards the parents that emanate because of that gap, and the turmoil the family has to go through because of the distorted intra-family bonds, everything is brilliantly depicted in this movie.
#3. Love behind bars in Afghanistan: No burqas behind bars and Prison Sisters
This series of documentaries by Swedish filmmaker Nima Sarvestani tells a very complicated and unconventional set of love stories. Both the documentaries trace the lives of a number of Afghan women in Afghanistan and Europe—often with heartbreaking details—after the fall of Taliban 1.0 and before they gained power again in 2021. While the love and camaraderie among the women blooms literally behind bars in the prison in the first part, the virtual bar of patriarchy draws a woman away from the freedom in European society in part two.
It is such a glaring tragedy that for the Afghan women, the situation now is far gloomier than the one depicted in the documentaries.
Both the films are behind a paywall and I strongly encourage you to pay $5 each for these brilliant and unique films so as to encourage the creative and daring efforts that the filmmakers like Sarvestani make to tell the story from some of the most frightening places in the world.
#2 Love to a place: The Miniaturist of Junagadh
Set in the post-partition India, this short film directed by Kaushal Oza is the intimate tale of love and loss, of belonging and uprooting and of creativity and disability.
#1. Best ever love: One that heals
I have written an entire column reviewing this documentary in Nepali which will be soon out at setopati. Those of you who can read Nepali can check it out here.
I first watched this in some festival last year. Later on, I found it in youtube and watched couple of times more. To this day, I haven’t read or heard any love story so heartrending and uplifting at the same time.
If you want to learn more about Mama Zawadi’s life, you may check out the BBC podcast on her here.
Part 2: How to think about love
Being no authority whatsoever when it comes to love, here I’ll quote someone I trust to be an authority of sort: psychologist M. Scott Peck.
I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.
Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that "falling in love" is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is "I love him" or "I love her." But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex-unless we are homosexually oriented-even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough.
…..
…the temporary loss of ego boundaries involved in falling in love and in sexual intercourse not only leads us to make commitments to other people from which real love may begin but also gives us a foretaste of (and there-fore an incentive for) the more lasting mystical ecstasy that can be ours after a lifetime of love. As such, therefore, while falling in love is not itself love, it is a part of the great and mysterious scheme of love.
Here is a pictorial scheme I once drew to illustrate Peck’s point about the interaction of ego boundaries in ‘falling in love’ and ‘true love’:
All the above quotes are taken from the book The road less traveled by M Scott Peck.
Here is my synopsis of the ideas on love from the book—published in Kantipur Koseli many years ago—in Nepali:
The second authority that I look up to in the matter of love and relationship is Alain de Botton. Just listen to him in this video to know what he is up to:
Finally, 4 of the 5 selected short films from Sundance Film Festival are still available at Festivalscope site. I was particularly moved by Displaced, Exam and Listen to the beat of our images. Please hurry up and enjoy them for free.