Love Is Strange

There are so many good things about this film. It’s a Manhattan romance. It’s a love letter to the rapidly vanishing bohemian and artistic milieu of New York, now priced out of town. It’s a wise description of the ‘make your own family’ culture of some modern lives. It’s a gentle anatomy of the horrors of outstaying your welcome, of being poor, sick and old. And it’s simply one of the best films about a long-term gay relationship ever made.

The cinematic image is so inherently powerful that even the seemingly mildest of films can carry the heavy weight of representation. Ira Sachs’s Love Is Strange, for instance, by virtue of its subject matter, is as pointed and political as it is warm and lyrical… Among many other matters, Sachs’s moving new film is concerned with this persistence of such vision: the invisible barriers that remain regardless of how far we’ve come.

In movies it’s the details that often bring transcendence… Filmmakers discover them by observing how people listen to one another, the way they talk and touch, the pauses that settle unexpectedly between them, the silent private moments. It’s a courageous film that’s willing to sit in those moments instead of underlining them or hurrying past them, hoping we get the shorthand. “Love is Strange” is a patient film. The emotions it unleashes are enormous.