Two Lovers

Perhaps this love triangle is a bit too big for this man who has been so disappointed by life and love so far. Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) has just thrown himself into the freezing water from a bridge near Brooklyn, when a sudden twitch and his subsequent recovery show that he still has a spark of will to survive. This is not the first suicide attempt by Leonard, who moves back in with his worried parents (Isabella Rossellini/Moni Moshonov) and allows them to set him up with the daughter of one of his father's business partners: the lovely but somewhat well-behaved Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). Leonard allows himself to be approached. But then he meets a woman for whom he would drop everything: Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) is volatile, shimmering, beautiful - and has recently moved into the apartment opposite. It is financed by her married lover. Michelle initially sees Leonard, who is deeply in love, as her best friend - and he has to make a hard decision. "Two Lovers" is the third collaboration between director James Gray and US star Joaquin Phoenix. They previously worked together on the magnificently dark anti-hero portraits of "Heroes of the Night" and "The Yards", in which young New Yorkers struggle to find their place in the world between hope and disillusionment. The love tragedy "Two Lovers" ventures into more romantic, but no less melancholy realms of an actually impossible decision. It is about the well-known, difficult to overcome opposites of security and passion, of closeness and distance. This is also reflected in the sensitive, restrained interior design, which transports us to a New York off the beaten tourist track and opens up an emotional love drama. "Phoenix and Paltrow act with such courage and lend so much credibility to the weaknesses and damage of their characters that Gray's film avoids the fate of a dull "romantic comedy" with big stars and remains worth seeing right to the optimistic end. The real discovery, however, is Vinessa Shaw as the initially frowned upon marriage candidate Sandra: the US newcomer ("Badland") plays her part as a tough wallflower who knows exactly what she wants with so much verve that you wish the anything but ugly duckling happiness with all your heart at the end of the film." (Andreas Borcholte at: www.spiegel.de) "The New York filmmaker stages the courtship with a precise eye in appropriate spaces. In Gray's work, these spaces never merely serve as a backdrop for the plot, but literally imprint themselves on it, condition it and drive it forward. The encounters between Leonard and Sandra mainly take place in Leonard's former teenage bedroom in his parents' apartment. The ceilings hang low, the light sources have a yellow and green cast, the corridors are too narrow, the furniture dark and massive. In their space-grasping presence and dominance, they literally push the two protagonists towards each other. An artificial, uncomfortable closeness is constructed that seems to smother the couple. [...] The essential meeting space of Michelle and Leonard is outside, beyond constricting walls, walls and doors. The urban, public space of New York is their place of closeness. Gray thus generates his very own topography of the city. He stages the remote, the other New York. [...] Gray has the two of them meet twice on the rooftops so typical of New York, removed from the hustle and bustle, the confusion and the street noise of the city. And precisely because no worldly rules and conventions seem to apply here, the leashes of the mind are loosened, a moment of closeness arises that could not be more intense and intimate." (Silke Roesler, at: www.critic.de)