The song of love is a sad sad song (etc.)

Given my speculations on the possible superiority of love songs over the thing itself, I feel duty bound to volunteer a few of my favourites in the genre. Love songs, that is, not loves. Although, not surprisingly, the songs that see us through assert their claims through association. Certain songs absorb as much as they impart, like sponges of sentiment. It’s time I gave them a squeeze.

Not surprisingly, most of the songs I value most are of the melancholy kind, for, as I never tire of asserting, or letting Nick Cave assert for me, “I believe the Love Song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow itself”. Or, as he more melodramatically puts it, with reference to his own clutch of such, “lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man”.

And yet, not all love songs are obviously sad, and not all are ballads. A few manage to cover up the tracks of the tears with a convincing ecstatic mask. As we’re just setting out, I should fill the floor not your hankies, so let’s start with some of the very few happy, toe-tappy love songs in the Helioholic’s hit parade. In no particular order, and in sporadic instalments here’s some of my favourite love songs.

Just to spite him, I’ll start with a rare instance of up-beat love lyricism from Mr Cave himself. Now, generally, love is a fairly anguished business for our old Nick, and I’ll have a few choice examples of this more characteristic mode in good time. Love is more likely to have him reaching for a handy rock – “for all beauty must die” (‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, from Murder Ballads) – than standard sentimental endearments. Which is why ‘Breathless’ from The Lyre of Orpheus is a surprising little gem. Nick, happily married Nick, doesn’t sing about love much these days, because contentment doesn’t suit his muse. But this finds his satanic majesty full of the joys of spring, with nature chorusing his happiness.

“It's up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you”.

(The heavy smoking Cave, getting up early and striding across the Sussex Downs, might have something to do with this condition, but I won’t spoil the moment for him). There’s a plaintive flute weaving in and out of the simple acoustic accompaniment, suggesting a merry troupe of minstrels prancing along behind the besotted Bad Seed whose let love in. And how.

“The happy hooded bluebells bow
And bend their heads all a-down
Heavied by the early morning dew
At the whispering stream, at the bubbling brook
The fishes leap up to take a look
For they are breathless over you”.

It’s surely the mark of genius when an artist can go so far left-field of his usual patch so convincingly. And yet, he’s changed the tempo, changed the tone, but the anguish is still just beneath the surface and between the lines. This is still a lifeline from a drowning man. The clue’s in the title.

"I listen to my juddering bones
The blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs
And I am breathless without you".

He kinda means it, somehow turning a rather sweet little ditty into a visceral immolation before the beloved. You just can’t keep a good Goth down.

And this applies equally to one of the most perfect Emo-anthems to love, ‘Just Like Heaven’ by The Cure. Big sounds, Big hair, are usually a Big turnoff for me, symbolised by one of the aural nadirs of a dodgy decade: The Alarm. But it’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for Robert Smith, who found a look and stuck with it, long after the backcombed bandwagon left town. Dear Robert is just a bit too cuddly to be a scary Goth, or convince us with the shadow puppet diablerie of his suburban psychodramas. Bless, this Creepy from Crawley can’t even put his lipstick on properly, and you can almost imagine a fussy aunt giving him a spit wash with a hankie to clean up the proper mess he’s made of it while he wriggles teetchily from her grasp. Michael Bracewell clinched it in his brilliant book, England is Mine, when he said in Smith’s songs “the soul is not so much bared as reduced to wandering around in its dressing gown all day”.

But that’s just why a song such as ‘Just like Heaven’ is so perfect, and speaks to tortured suburban romantics everywhere. Boys do Cry. Love is big, and its emotions are big, even when worn moochily by gauche adolescent suburbanites. It captures something of the child-like glee of love. Partly through the tumbling jangle of heart-catchy guitars (making Altered Images sound like Slipknot), and partly through the wide-eyed love-stoked wonder of Smith’s lyrics:

“Show me show me show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you"

It should be fey, but somehow it isn’t. (A grown man with a thatched head and fright slap gushing thus). But twee soon turns Wagnerian, as Wuthering Heights comes to Worthing on Sea.

"Daylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone alone
Alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me".

In other words, I woke up and it was all a dream. Too much Merrydown on a Sussex cliff and this is bound to happen. Yet it has everything in this song to delight the sensitive suburban soul. Soaring from glee to Goth gloom in 3 perfect minutes. A soaring love anthem for the eternally lost and lonely.

Finally, and this might surprise you, but what romp through the vinal vales of lyrical loves past would be complete without ‘Come on Eileen’? Yes, I know it’s been tarnished by overexposure, with faux school discos flogging the dead horse of popular nostalgia, but I still really love this song. It is a landmark for me, as one of the very rare instances when I like what everyone else likes and join in a national enthusiasm. I usually go the other way in principle, but not this time. Few people don’t like ‘Come on Eileen’, and everyone loved it when it reached no. 1 in the summer of 1982. It floated from countless open windows, capturing the youthful mood of summer. Agreed, it’s rather pompous, Rowland is a plonker, and their charity shop Romany Romanticism fooled no one. But sometimes you’ve just got to go with it. It was the year of my first proper love, and my first broken heart. But not yet, when Dexys topped the charts and stomped the boards, that love was at its height. It was the very sound of love, and I was happy to stomp along to its tune, forgetting all in adolescent abandon. An instant exit from Croydon. For that is what it is about. Escaping, the destined drudgery of background:

"These people round here wear beaten down eyes
Sunk in smoke dried faces they're so resigned to what their fate is,
But not us, no not us we are far too young and clever.
Remember Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye-Aye
Eileen I'll hum this tune forever".

He’s right. We have. Forever 15 and in first love, restored by a record.

(I've no idea how to embed Youtube widgets like the clever blogs do, but here are the links. Enjoy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb45RkfWjV0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ThWaMnlSZM&feature=PlayList&p=1598BC8EB2044468&playnext=1&index=57

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5StFADI9NM

Are love songs better than love?

It's a genuine question I'd like to ruminate on and, I hope, debate (as well as a pretext for some smart-assed sophistries from a sentimental cynic). Of course, it largely depends on the love song or love in question. I think I would be prepared to endure the worst parts of the worst relationships for eternity rather than hear 'Lady in Red' for a fraction of that time. But I think there is more than intrinsic 'quality' at issue here. I didn't know those relationships were going to be painful when they started out, we both of us must have had the highest hopes, the best intentions. But surely Chris De Blurgh knew what he was doing when he unleashed that abomination on the world, and for this his song must be confined for eternity on Anthrax Island* So, I think, love songs have at least the potential to eclipse that about which they purport to warble. How?

Ars longa, vita brevis (life is short, but art is long), teaches the sage, and that applies to the art of the love song. Nick Cave, who knows about these things, gave a lecture on the love song, telling how he wrote his song 'Far From Me' over 4 months, during which time the relationship he was writing about changed, in fact ended. What started out as a lament for a distant loved one became one for a lost love. As he concludes: "The peculiar magic of the love song ... is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attracts itself to you and together you move through time". The Smiths's song 'Rubber Ring' says something similar, with that eternal malcontent Morrissey resenting the fact that his songs of loneliness might be forsaken when his public (oh, but never he), are: "dancing and laughing / And finally living / Hear my voice in your head / And think of me kindly". Songs, he claims"were the only ones who ever stood by you". And they do. But lover's don't. They always leave, as Ryan Adams sings, when you need them most. Songs are long, and life, and love, are short.

And yet, songs aren't long, and that also makes them superior to love itself. In three minutes you can have rapture, reconciliation, even rumpy pumpy when you want them. Love songs know when it's over, know when to shut up. Before the rise of the Chavson d' Amour of the Lilly Allen school started churning out love songs that make a merit of mundanity, gnawing the gristly Greggs pastie of pop), love songs offered excitement and wonder. You can have variety without promiscuity or satiety. Rapture here - 'ain't love the sweetest thing'; regret there - 'Nothing compares 2 u'; and reverie - ' Lover, you should have come over' - to complete the cycle. Neat, complete and in your control. Who would bother with the real thing when the world is full of silly love songs.

When love has let you down, they're there to comfort, console and instruct. They've been through it all before, and can help you get through it too. They can make sense of what makes no sense at all. What does love teach us? Plenty. Do we learn from it? Rarely. Love songs have clarity, coherence and completion, while love is messy, ad-hoc, mendacious, and never quite finished. It ain't over even when it's over. With love songs you can chose the mood to suit. Can love ever be like that? You know where you are with them, following a tried and trusted formula. Love so often changes its tune when least expected. You might start out walking on sunshine, but end up crying in the rain.

If I'm considering pros and cons, then love is decidedly the latter. The oldest one in the book. Whilst we retain the discernment to judge a good love song from a bad, how difficult is it to do the same with love? Yet if we are conned by love, love songs are partly to blame. Their perfection, their subtle sophistries lead us astray, teaching us to believe and to deceive in love's name. Hence the danger of love songs, both good and bad. Lady in Red drips poison in the ears of the besotted, smooching closer to the clammy chimera of 'Romance', and getting a whole breed of bastard offshoots even viler than their progenitor. 'Unchained Melody', 'I'm in the Mood For Love', 'Love is Stronger than Pride', might delight us, but they also deceive us into believing their mighty fables, and introducing the canker worms ino the bud of our poor mortal loves.

I first sketched these notes when I was on a plane. It was during takeoff, and so all electrical equipment had to be switched off, including my iPod. I looked across the aisle and saw a couple holding hands while the plane took off. I had my notes and the love songs I couldn't play, but they had each other.

*Anthrax Island Discs is a game I think I invented, which is the nightmare counterpart of the weedy luvvy fest of radio fame. You decide which records you hope to never hear again for as long as you live (I promise I thought of this before Room 101 came along, but what do you care?). For your information, along with Chris's golden classic are, of course, 'I Just Called to Say I Love you', 'Hello' by Lionel Ritche, Bohemian Rhapsody, in fact most of Queen's backlist, and if there's room Oaasis too (except 'Don't Look Back in Anger'). I'm sure I used to know precisely which songs should be suffering there, but maybe I've mellowed with age, or just stopped listening to the radio, or being invited to weddings (well. would you?). It grew out of that where's my revolver instinct triggered by the incessant drek-bath that is listening to the radio. I have long since let the poptastic wireless fall silent, and am a good deal more clement as a consequence.

Woman found, lost, then recovered – Before Sunset

I suppose I’ve strung this out long enough. It’s time to bring on the happy ending for this thread.
Sequels are generally disasters artistically, and usually obey the Hollywood principle that if you flog a winning horse long enough, at some point you’ll have to accept it’s dead. Before Sunset is not like this. To say it is as good as Before Sunrise is beside the point. It simply completes that story, and gives it another dimension, that of mature reflection and hard-won acquiescence to the demands of romance. They fully earn their happy ending.

Taken together Sunrise-Sunset let’s us have our cake and eat it too. It just takes 9 years to finish the meal. Sunrise ended with the mature artistic ambivalence about a happy ending. Did they meet up again 6 months later, was the spark still there? How bold, reckless, trusting, or perhaps cynically knowing not to exchange phone numbers or even surnames. The filmmaker was as mature and discerning as the characters were reckless. It’s a beautiful but complex gesture. And it could resonate for the duration of the 9 year hiatus, occasionally surfacing as an unresolved question. A bit like the ‘what might have been’ Jesse evokes as the argument for his impetuous suggestion. Get off the train, or you will never know…

We didn’t know for quite a while. In between life, messy, disorganised life intervened. How was it for us? How many trips on the Ferris wheel of love? How many fallings down to earth? We grow old, we grow old. All of us, viewers and characters alike. We cannot conquer Time.

Time is again the principal theme of Sunset. The ‘before’ indicates that the clock is ticking, with another plane to catch (or not). And sunset, the cinematic shorthand for a happy ending is what they are up against. Will the plane fly West from Paris in pursuit of it, or will they make their sun stand still, and redeem Time? Real time this time. From the first scene at Shakespeare & Company where Jesse is reading from his novel about that one night in Vienna, through their walk and boat trip through Paris, and the endlessly deferred deadline of making that plane, the film intensifies the tension by playing out in real time. A plane to catch, a real-life anxiety we can all share, is but another turn of the screw. This is one plane we are happy to miss.

Not quite the first scene. Cleverly, the film’s opening pays homage to its progenitor. Sunrise ended by revisiting the locations the couple had populated that evening, now empty, and forlorn without their chatter and life. Sunset starts by viewing the empty scenes that will be populated in the film that follows. It underlines the emptiness of the lives Jesse and Celine have been living. Cold, dead years, devoid of romance.

Celine visits the bookshop where Jesse is reading from his novel about that night, and the frozen time starts to melt. Slowly. They have reversed roles. She is more cynical than the dreamy girl of 9 years before. Jesse’s book is ‘very Romantic’, I don’t usually like that’. He assures her that his fictionalised account that had brought their romance up to date originally had a different ending. The couple (them) had originally met up as arranged, spent a few days together and realise there’s nothing there. ‘I prefer that. It’s much more realistic’. But his editor made him change it. ‘Everyone wants to believe in love. It sells’. How true. And so they draw us in, our desires shadowing them round Paris.

So what really happened? He turned up. she didn’t. Her grandmother died, and the funeral was that day. She had no way of contacting him. A tragic irony worthy of Hardy. But it meant Jesse wrote a book, maybe to make sense of it all. If he hadn’t Celine would never have found him again. He wrote her back into his life, and now they can re-write the past. Celine has had a string of relationships, but is happier alone. Jesse is married, with a child, yet his life is devoid of love. It’s quite clear ‘romance’ happened back then, and only then. They have never got over that what might have been.

Another walk through a European city, another re-connection. Not just any city. Paris in late summer. They go to a cafe. They take a river trip – usually for tourists – as the sun slowly sets. In other words, they take a trip on the Tunnel of clichéd Love, and yet still they resist. Or pretend too. ‘Maybe we are only good at brief encounters in European cities’. How will they ever know?

You're going to miss that plane. There’s still time he protests. Time for one last cup of tea at her place - a Boho Parisian appartment to die for - and for Celine to sing one of her own songs. Just a little waltz (which comes from Vienna, of course). ‘I just want another night, another try’, the song ends. And with it the film. "Baby, you ARE going to miss that plane".... "I know." And so the sun sets slowly, fading out to the strains of Nina Simone. He’s not going to board that plane. But the war is over now, sacrifices are no longer demanded for a greater good. They can always have their Paris. Happy ever after (we can hope). They earned it.

(Please Mr Linklater, leave it be there. Don’t revisit it, up-date it, worry over how they are doing. Please don’t feel the urge to pick the scab. It is quite, quite perfect. Let them grow old and happy together beyond the silver screen. Give hope to the hopeless.)

Up-date on Paris

I just thought I’d report back from Romance Central, and confirm whether or no it is still delivering on its brand. I was there principally on business, but had at least 24 hours to survey the territory as the roving reporter of Romance, and have this to report.

Yes. As I suspected, nothing essential has changed in the 4 years I was there last. It’s not just the skyline. That was as pristine in its preservation as I anticipated. And rightly so. There is also a preservation in the way things are done. The tempo and rituals of life that add up to a quintessentially Parisian ‘atmosphere’. A hard-to-define aura that pervades the very stones. Shops in the same places selling the same stuff at the same time of year, unchanged and unchanging since lord knows when. It somehow gives you hope. This nostalgia, heritage appeal, solidly sentimental clinging to the way things are done, gives it a big tick in the Romance box.

Yet, not everything was unchanged, and I didn’t think I’d live to see this. Paris bars are now non-smoking. Incroyable! Not that I find smoking attractive, or romantic. I’ve never smoked, not one single ciggie, and I thank the lord smoking has been banned in the UK. But somehow I don’t feel the same prejudice against it in the Parisian cafes and bars. A cigarette that bears the lipstick’s traces, waved in gesticulation by a sultry be-bobbed and bereted beauty, who looks icily at me through her cigarette smoke across a crowded bar is part of my fantasy picture of the café society I was happy to view from the sidelines. I suppose I’ll have to relegate that one to history now. There they were, mind, puffing and quaffing outside in the freezing cold under heaters like us Brits, so in some ways it’s business as usual. I must, however, put a cross in the Romance box for banning smoking (and this only applies to Paris).

Another thing that had changed, WAS THE BLOODY PRICE OF EVERYTHING. Strawberries were decidedly more than 7 Francs a Kilo. Things, essential things, like food, wine and fancy clobber, have gone up astronomically over the last 5 years as it is. Add to this the positive prostration of the pound against all world currencies (sterling having actually dipped below the euro), and my pleasure of swanning round Paris absorbing Romance was severely diminished. Part of the pleasure of Paris was the indulgence of senses severely chastened at home. The flâneur cedes to the gourmand in the happy hunting grounds of the boulevard bistros; the haunter of cafes will soak that much longer, with 2 or 3 glasses of an afternoon more than would be acceptable or affordable in London, and so experiences that exotic life to the full. No longer. More expensive than London now, I thought twice about flouncing into places I used to haunt with luxuriant impunity before, and spent ages scrutinizing menus before sheepishly melting away. Being here on my own, I just couldn’t justify the indulgence. Romance is a luxury, or at least the illusion of luxury, formally sustained by favourable exchange rates. (Having said this, I was travelling ‘Premium Business Class’ on Eurostar, which, for about £35 more one way, you can lig your way back into luxury. A fully stocked bar at my disposal, and with two hours to wait for my Champagne-soaked journey back to Blighty under the magic tunnel, I stepped back into St Pancras and all was right with the world and my wallet).

Eurostar, whilst not belonging to Paris, has become an essential part of experiencing it (I can’t imagine why anyone would fly there), and even though it is an innovation, just 15 years old, it actually speeds us smoothly back into the never never land of Romance. Eurostar transports this sea-girt culture over the frontiers of possibility into a continent, one connected at the furthest edge with Istanbul. Without the Disney-land pretension of actually taking what’s left of the Orient Express (for those without imagination who want their faux romance served on a silver-plated platter). Someone has actually had the good sense to burrow out of Blighty (without the commandants noticing), and then laid on a high-speed choo choo to take us to exciting lands beyond. Take a Eurostar and experience what is all but dead in the railway network generally, but richly evocative of a golden age of travel. There’s not a whiff of deliberate heritage about The Eurostar brand, but, for we Brits at least, it can't help making us sigh for a vanished age - of speed, luxury, courtesy, service. All that, and French ladies in uniforms serving you Champagne. Big tick in the Romance box as part of the Parisian experience.

Paris was covered in snow while I was there. Pristine, white-glittery fairy tale snow, making it all the more Romantic. Why? Because rare, and special and long-ago. Boy, that place knows how to deliver. And it covers us all the dog turds (one piece of essential Parisian street furniture we might readily relegate to the dustbin; but then the Parisian’s right to let his or her beastly little pooch poop where it likes is a small price to pay for the more favourable anachronisms elsewhere). And so how was it, wandering around Paris, the city for lovers, all on my Jacques Jones? Solitude was not the ideal situation to audit Paris’s brand, I admit. And yet, there kept coming to me unbidden, as a traversed the familiar unchanging cityscape, memories of earlier visitations. Visitations accompanied by the reality of ‘romance’. In other words, the ghosts of rows past. The last time I was in Paris I was in love, and yet it was the setting for the first serious row, or flip out of what turned out to be a very bumpy relationship. The reality is, you can bring a romance to the banks of the Seine, but you can’t make it drink. We didn’t row the whole time we were there, I’m glad to say, but madame was a world class sulker. So many of the scenes I visited were misted by melancholy recollection of this sentiment. By revisiting them I was able to restore them to their former, and future glory. I was accountable only to myself, and where my whim my take me under a perfect blue sky. Notre Dame soared above me, the Tour d’ Eiffel twinkled anew in the sunlight without a twinge of regret. They were wiped clean and ready for the next time, the marvellous maybe of many loves to come. Paris is indeed the city for lovers, even, perhaps especially, when you’re on your own.

We’ll always have Paris II

When Bogey uttered those immortal words, which sealed the doom for his immediate happiness, but ensured the eternal flame of romance’s most iconic (un)happy ever afters, the choice of location was far from arbitrary. Or rather, the fact that it was Paris and not, well… [substitute just about any location] … plays no small part in the potency of his romantic renunciation. Paris, occupied by barbarians, was a precious, fragile treasury of all that was worth fighting for, and returning to in peace time. Paris is always somewhere to return to in peace time, in spring time, in love time. Paris is always always.

This is the first major icon / cliché of romance I’ve attempted to take on, on its own right. I’m not really capable of doing justice to it, as this is a big big question, the surface of which I can only skim here (like the creamy foam on a Café au lait, grazed dreamily a a Boulevard Café). You see, it’s very difficult not to employ clichés when dealing with Paris, and especially so when tackling the whole Paris = romantic platitude. It is perhaps one of the biggest truisms in romance’s repertoire, and one of the most consistent and coherent ideas ever held about a place. Although we have pretty clear ideas about New York, Rome, Tokyo, London, only Paris has a universally agreed adjective attributed to it.

But why, and, more importantly, when? If I had time, and the British Library had been open when I was pondering this question, I might have backed up the following speculations with a bit of substance. I might just do that when I get the chance; but now I’m going to hazard a guess it was between the wars when Paris became officially ‘romantic’. This idea was obviously fully-formed by 1942, but I don’t think was there in the 19th century, and was certainly not there before that. Paris was sexy, racy, daring, naughty before ‘romantic’ became its official descriptor. This might have contributed to and evolved into the later idea, but it had a different association and value at the time. It meant licence and libertarianism to the Anglo-American imagination, stifled by puritan propriety and prohibition. And this was firmly associated with a progressiveness. Paris was a modern city. It had chopped heads off kings, planned its streets on rational lines, and was at the forefront of what we would now quaintly call ‘sexual permissiveness’. Finally, the official style of Paris’s greatest, most iconic moment was self-consciously Nouveau.

New is not romantic. Paris became romantic when the rest of the world underwent its own revolutions and cataclysms, and Paris was looked to to embody and preserve a vanishing or just vanished order. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the conservative, chauvinistic side of the French mentality came to the fore, and decided to deliver on our demands, and manage the Paris brand rigorously by allowing very little change. The periphique stops it sprawling, like London; the French mind rightly resists the incursion of Starbucks et al., and someone in the planning dept at the Hôtel de Ville, has obviously decreed that the river skyline will change over his dead body. I’m pretty much certain that I could stand on the Pont de la Tournelle and look at Notre Dame and beyond tomorrow, and find the view pretty much as I left it exactly four years ago. Which is exactly what I intend to do, as I’m going to Paris on a flying visit, and this is why I’m prompted to prematurely pontificate on this question.

Paris is romantic because it has made the preservation of an epoch, la belle epoch, part of its official identity, and sealed the idea in. And it is this we re-visit, in recollection, and reality. ‘At the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair’ ('Ballad of Lucy Jordan') - never really love, in other words. Not like Bogart and Bergman (I’m sure it’s a reference to Casablanca, and the flashbacks to Rick, actually smiley and looking soppy at Ilsa in an open top car). Last Tango in Where? Why not Buenos Aires? As it nearly all takes part in an apartment, truly it could have been anywhere. But then, truly it couldn’t.

Talking of apartments, there is a very stylish French Film called L’Appartement, which I’ve seen about 3 times now, and I still can’t work out exactly what goes on. It’s some kind of tricksy mystery about the exchange of identities between two very saucy and chic brunettes, who are chased all over Paris by a young man. The problem is, I can’t pay attention to the plot, as I’m too busy following two very saucy and chic brunettes all over Paris, and couldn’t give a stuff about the intrigue. The first time I saw it I wandered out of the cinema in a daze, and couldn’t speak for about 10 minutes. I swear, if I’d had my passport with me, I’d have caught the first Eurostar to Paris and joined in the sport. No mater how saucy the ladies, I would not have considered boarding a train so recklessly to anywhere else.*

Eurostar. Now there’s a romantic spot. Forget about that simply absurd statue they’ve erected. Sit there one afternoon in a bar; drink Champagne, and simply watch the trains depart. Sigh, dream, recollect, regret, and have another sip of Champagne, and watch another train. One day, just maybe… with the warm wind in your hair.

* A few years after watching that film, indeed a few months after my Faintheart at Holborn Tube incident nearly 8 years ago, I went to Paris, and met a young lady in a shoe shop. She was working there while a student, and the shoes were rather nice. I bought 2 pairs out of guilt for having spent so long chatting to her, and we spent the next year taking it in turns to commute by Eurostar. And then? Well, I think I have one of the shoes somewhere.

Woman recovered, then given away - We’ll always have Paris

Of course I need to delay completing my post on Before Sunrise / Sunset (after all, Linklater took 9 years to complete the romance between Jesse and Celine, so I have plenty of scope), which would take us to Paris. So I thought I’d ponder on a classic variation on this regret-renunciation-remembrance = romance thread: Casablanca.

Too obvious? Forgive me, but I’m just back from Morocco (albeit Essaouira), where I went to escape the horror of Christmas, and to restore the true meaning of the festival with a bit of sun worship. And while I was there I read Tahir Shah’s book The Caliph’s House, about his adventures living in the city where the film is supposedly set. He relates encountering a mad American who travels the world watching the film everywhere it is playing, and who declares it the greatest film ever made. Many would agree, as it still tops the favourite film ratings, suggesting it still has the power to stir us 65 years after it was made.

I think this is down to the way it combines the archetypal with the historical and topical. The classic love-triangle is as old as romance itself (as Lancelot and Guinevere at least), but is enriched by the war-time conflict between personal desire and patriotic duty. And as time goes by (sorry), that period itself, and certainly its setting in what was once the Art Deco jewel of French North Africa, have acquired their own Romantic veneer as an epoch to sigh after. Who wouldn’t wish to walk into that particular gin joint, swathed in stark film noir ambiance, and hear the tinkle of that piano, just about to play that song? Memory, melancholy, a certain melody, borders, crossroads, danger, the exotic orient - the film is a veritable tagine of Romance, spiced with all its essential ingredients. OK, on the ‘oriental’ side it may be, as Tahir Shah points out, a farrago of Hollywood fantasy of old Arabia, whereas ‘the Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe’. But I’m dealing with romance here, not reality, and exaggeration and fantasy are the life blood of this concept, and add to the film’s enduring appeal.

I’m not going to just witter on about the film, or about orientalism and Romance, as I’m qualified to do neither. I’m interested in that line, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ muttered while an engine roars in anticipation of departure. This brings us to the next leg of our journey started by faint-hearted Hardy not getting off that train. ‘We’ll always have Paris”. Always is a tricky concept in the Romance repertoire. This is what Wilde’s Lord Henry has to say about it In Dorian Gray: “Always!. That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever”. Yet we’re not talking about the happy-ever-after always of clinging anticipation, but of fond recollection. The past is redeemed by Ilsa walking into that gin joint and restoring their memories of Paris.

Here we are again, at the crossroads of Romance, and an engine is already running. Rick reasons that Ilsa should get on that plane along similar lines to Jesse suggesting Celine get off that train - the projected anticipation of regret. But with a difference here. “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Wise-cracking cynical Americans moulding the destinies of dreamy Europeans are evidently not all alike. There’s a war on, don’t you know, and so personal Romance is commandeered for a Greater Good. The Underground has its hero, Rick has his redemption, and they will Always have their memories. And not just of anywhere - of PARIS no less...

Woman found then lost...

Girls on trains, radiant strangers, the romance of regret? Of course, there are exceptions, and rules (like hearts) are there to be broken.

‘Happy ever after’ is the approved romance ending, but does it spell the end of romance? This is the paradox that delightful diptych ‘Before Sunrise / Sunset’ explores so beautifully and plausibly, making them such devastatingly ‘romantic’ films, when manipulative drivel like ‘Love Actually’, actually is not*

Before Sunrise (1995), Boy meets girl on a train. She (French, shy, dreamy) is continuing on to Paris; he (American, worldly-wise, confident) must get off at Vienna to catch a morning flight back home. They chat, they connect, and as the train pulls into Vienna, he moves into familiar territory: "If I don’t ask you this, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life". Ah, he’s read the poems, heard the songs. No faint heart in a railway station he, he asks her to leave the train with him, and walk around Vienna for the evening. His reasoning and audacity are faultless:

“Jump ahead 10-20 years from now, you’re married, but it just doesn’t have the energy it once had. … and you start to think about all those guys you've met, and start to wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d picked up with any of them. Well. I’m one of those guys. Think of it as time travel… This could be doing a gigantic favour to you and your future husband, showing you you didn’t miss out on anything. I’m just as much a loser as he is, and you’re really happy”.

This is how it starts, and goes on, somehow managing to be both romantic – impetuous, dreamy, idealistic –; and realistic - cynical, wary and knowing – at the same time. The dialogue (and the film is mostly dialogue), threads a swaying tight rope across the chasm dividing romance and realism, and they walk it engagingly together.

Defying convention, defying genre, it earns the right to romanticism, by being so very honest. One meaning of ‘Romance’, after all, when used as a verb is to fib, or at least to exaggerate. ‘Romancing’ before it was used to rhyme with ‘dancing’ in throwaway pop, meant telling porkies. "Do you know anyone in a happy relationship?" Celine asks. ""yeah, but I think they lie a lot". But, there’s none of that here. Principally because they only have that one night together. Stolen from time – “officially we shouldn’t be here”. So happy every after (the biggest fib of romance), isn’t an option, and is summarily dismissed: “Why do people believe relationships are supposed to last for ever? Yeah it’s stupid”.

And so they fall into romance by resisting it through reason. We’re rational adults, they keep assuring each other, trying to convince themselves of the logic of not attempting to stay in touch. The more honest (ie unromantic) they are, the more they earn the right to what they resist. They rub reality against the debased coinage of romance, against all its clichés and conventions, they rub it so hard it eventually shines through.

But at their back they always hear Time’s winged Chariot (the 9.30 Austria Airlines flight to America) hurrying near. And so they make love, under the stars, and finally make a pact with their cold reasoning. They will not exchange numbers or addresses (not even surnames), so none of that happy-ever-after stuff is even considered. They refused to be hoodwinked by false hope. Instead they will meet in exactly six months. Time, cheated, travelled through, deferred, will have his due. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time”. TBC (of course).

*Oh, that ‘actually’, the smug, so-very English embarrassed understatement, qualifying the tawdry, vulgar passionate ‘Love’ and sanitising it into Home Counties idiom: ‘I did go to a public school, quite a famous one, Actually’; ‘Actually, I was hoping to get into TV/publishing/film, and was wondering if you knew of any openings, yes my father was x, I suppose the name gives it away’; ‘I don’t Actually know anything about it, but I’m sure I’ll do a splendid job’…Actually, I am bitter, and I haven’t actually seen Love Actually, but that snivelling caval of posh luvvies is sufficient demerit in my book.