ROMANCE MOVIES FOR ARCHITECTURE / URBAN DESIGN ENTHUSIASTS
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! As always, here's the annual list, with some new additions.
1. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) Widely considered to be one of the most beautiful films ever made, this is as much a lyrical portrait of 1960′s Hong Kong as it is a tale of doomed romance. The 12th Century Temples of Angkor Wat also make an appearance.
2. PAST LIVES (2023) A bittersweet musing on romantic destiny and cultural identity, this film is also a fond ode to New York. Brooklyn's Jane’s Carousel, in its Jean Nouvel-designed pavilion, features in a key scene. Its used as a reference to nostalgia, and as a nod to the questions of fate and destiny with which the characters are grappling.
3. EMMA (2020) This was shot on location at the 16th Century estate of Firle Place, whose interiors were refitted to evoke a bright, candy-coloured dollhouse, symbolising Emma’s well-intentioned manipulation of others’ lives. The distinctive macaron-style colour scheme looks contemporary, but is historically accurate: the now-faded decorative items of the Regency era were once very vibrant, with bright colours favoured as a way of indicating prosperity.
4. BERGMAN ISLAND (2021) This gently-paced film provides a cinematic escape to the beautiful Swedish island of
Fårö, a small community where director Ingmar Bergman lived and shot several of his films. Multiple dwellings from the Bergman Estate feature in the film, especially the dark stained mid century 'Hammars', a unpretentious and quietly beautiful house set on a rocky shore, where Bergman lived from 1967 until the end of his life.
5. COLUMBUS (2017) This was marketed as a romance film, but whether or not it is one depends on your interpretation of the central relationship. Either way, there’s no doubt that it’s a great movie for people who love mid century architecture.
6. ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2014) In the sub-category of Night-time Cities in Films, this has no equal. I’m yet to visit Detroit, but no other movie has captured, for me, the exact feel of after-dark Tangier. In both locations, Jim Jarmusch has harnessed an exotic, seedy, beauty that perfectly matches his characters and story.
7. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017) Luca Guadagnino is known as a ‘director of the senses’ - unusually adept at evoking for us the sights, sounds, and even the smells and tactile experiences of a time and place (such as a 16th Century villa in 1980′s Italy). But here he accomplishes something beyond this - enabling us to momentarily feel for ourselves the sensation of falling deeply, precariously, in love.
8. A SINGLE MAN (2009) This story of love and loss stars John Lautner’s 1949 Schaffer Residence. The film’s immaculate Mid-Century style is the result of a collaboration between director Tom Ford and Mad Men production designer Dan Bishop.
9. BEFORE SUNSET (2004) As in the previous instalment of this trilogy, the pleasures of wandering around an unfamiliar city provide this film with its context and structure, and also reinforce its romantic theme of a journey of accidental discovery.
10. I AM LOVE (2009) A Jill Sander-clad Tilda Swinton is the conflicted matriach of a wealthy Milanese family, living in Piero Portaluppi’s 1935 Villa Necchi.
11. MAESTRO (2023) This biopic was filmed in New York City, Connecticut, and at Tanglewood, a music venue founded in 1938. Much of the film takes place in the Bernsteins' apartment in New York's Dakota building. The home was recreated as sets, but for the scenes which took place at the family's Connecticut weekend house, that actual property was used.
12. HER (2008) Spike Jonze’s near-future LA is a cleaned up, greened-up amalgam of the actual present-day city and the Pudong business district of Shanghai, infused with the palette of a Jamba Juice store.
13. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) This film encourages us to gaze, unashamedly, at every detail of its sparsely beautiful 18th Century interiors, spectacular coastal landscape, and cast of four female characters. And it generously imbues that gaze with significance, by aligning it with that of an artist, or a lover.
14. LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) The loneliness, cultural disorientation, and general sense of freedom and discovery that come with being in an utterly foreign city provide the catalyst for an unexpected romance.
15. MANHATTAN (1979) See this film for a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, and for the fact that its central love story actually takes place not between the characters of Isaac and Tracy, but between Woody Allen and New York.
16. BLADERUNNER (1982) As with some of the others, this isn’t technically a romance film, but its love story is as integral to the movie as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, Sumner Hunt/ George Wyman’s Bradbury Building, and that perpetually rainy cyber-punk city. Cinema’s most beautiful (and romantic) urban dystopia.
17. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945) One for all the urban designers out there, this is a film about two individuals who are drawn into each other’s lives by the use of public transport :-). For a less iconic riff on the same theme, there’s also the Meryl Streep / Robert De Niro FALLING IN LOVE (1984) (in which De Niro plays an architect). Both films celebrate the kind of chance encounters which are missed when sitting alone in a private vehicle.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS: CHUNGKING EXPRESS (1994), WALL E (2008), WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), THE PHANTOM THREAD (2018), THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001), ONCE (2006), LA JETEE (1962), AMELIE (2001), THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (2014), À BOUT DE SOUFFLE (1960). (Photo: Schaffer Residence, John Lautner, 1949 (A Single Man) jasonschmidtstudio for AD France)