{"id":11059,"date":"2010-11-23T11:25:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T19:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=11059"},"modified":"2010-11-23T11:59:25","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T19:59:25","slug":"blue-valentine-derek-cianfrance-2010-usa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=11059","title":{"rendered":"Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, 2010): USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy<\/a>.\u00a0 Viewed at the Riviera, Santa Barbara, CA.<\/p>\n

\"\" Blue Valentine<\/a><\/em> is a simple tale of love and marriage gone awry.<\/p>\n

The film opens on a working class\u00a0couple with a child, \u00a0and then reverts back in time to when the two first meet, before marriage, responsibility and commitment.<\/p>\n

Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) first meet in a senior retirement home, where she is visiting her aged grandmother\u00a0while he is across the hall moving in an elderly man.\u00a0 Dean takes a chance on love at first sight, and gives Cindy his\u00a0phone number to contact him but\u00a0she never does.<\/p>\n

He works for a moving company while she is a student pursuing a career in the medical profession.\u00a0 Dean finds a locket that he knows belongs to that same elderly man and he decides to seize the opportunity to\u00a0return the lost locket and check on Cindy across the hall.<\/p>\n

The two begin a romance and a passionate affair,\u00a0but Cindy is cautious since she recently suffered an ugly break up with another guy.\u00a0 After discovering that she is pregnant, and suspecting that the baby is of her former beau, Cindy first attempts to abort the baby with Dean’s support and then changes her mind.<\/p>\n

Several years later and the two have\u00a0become exhausted, fragile, and overly sensitive parents of a little girl.\u00a0 Cindy no longer feels the same\u00a0passion but instead\u00a0craves mental and emotional stimulation.\u00a0 Dean no longer feels desired or appreciated and becomes embittered.<\/p>\n

As Cianfrance’s tale unfolds, he uses a series of effective cross-cuts that jump back and forth from present to past, and from Dean’s POV to Cindy’s POV.\u00a0 The emotion is deep, the acting is raw and the dialogue is sincere.\u00a0 The film pulls us into the personal world of Dean and Cindy, and we are\u00a0suspended until the end credits.<\/p>\n

Since the\u00a0disintegration of the marriage\u00a0is not about infidelity or abuse, it very pointedly asks a question – should one stay in a relationship for the sake of a child, or leave for the sake of that child?\u00a0 The film does not contain gratuitous sexual situations.\u00a0 It does\u00a0show explicit love-making scenes to reveal the initial passion and ultimate demise of the relationship, and for this reason was issued an NC-17 rating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Kathleen Amboy.\u00a0 Viewed at the Riviera, Santa Barbara, CA. Blue Valentine is a simple tale of love and marriage gone awry. The film opens on a working class\u00a0couple with a child, \u00a0and then reverts back in time to when the two first meet, before marriage, responsibility and commitment. Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema-society","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}