It’s a wonderful thought, for Patty Pravo, but for many it remains a silent desire, an image that tickles the imagination, cloaking ordinary everyday life in eroticism. The ménage à trois is something to keep in itself. Don’t say, don’t show, because kept away from social morality. Nevertheless, what is played out at the cinema is to all intents and purposes a threesome: there is a director, who observes, seduces with his gaze, forever collects bodies of actors who lend themselves to his flattery; there are characters who illusorily live their own unique life in the space of a vision; and then there are the spectators, no longer bystanders, but an integral part of this particular relationship: they are the three vertices of a triangle who, when the lights are turned off, in the darkness of the room, satisfy their hidden desires, stimulate their imagination, or let their imaginations run wild. ghosts of one’s fears.
And cinema itself, even the classic Hollywood one, has never held back, sometimes sweetening, smoothing out with the force of laughter, the corners of an otherwise burning topic such as that of the ménage a trois. That stupendous thought, which creeps a little, has therefore always been an integral part of the cinematographic language, seducing it, bewitching it, so as to reserve for itself a completely personal space within its own golden deposit. From Woody Allen, to Jean-Luc Godard, through the recent Celine Song and his Past Livesand Luca Guadagnino with his Challengers (here you can read our review of Challengers), there are many authors who have drank from this source, investing their works with sensuality, making own pairs of triangles that are at times bewitching, others repelling.
Scandal in Philadelphia – The Philadelphia Story by George Cukor (1940)
Cinema – we have said it over and over again – is like a window onto reality; but there was a period in which this opening was limited by railings, mosquito nets, curtains, which obscured the view, or filtered the passage of external information. Once upon a time there was classic Hollywood cinema, limited in its narrative construction by rules, filters, codes (the famous “Hayes Code”) which curbed the imagination, reduced the topics, sweetened the relationships. Yet, the love triangle still managed to make its way through these celluloid images.
Undressed in his most sensual dress, he was able to exploit the ingenuity of his screenwriters to live under more chaste clothes. They are above all stories of men who long for the same woman, a dreamy figure, or one strong in her own confidence, who she seduces, scrutinizes and then chooses (sometimes independently, others at the behest of others). So it was for The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Casablancabut above all for Scandal in Philadelphiaexploiting the subgenre of remarriage comedies (or “comedy of remarriage”), George Cukor’s work sketches out the fragilities and insecurities that grip lovers, determined to move away to throw themselves into the arms of others, yet still so bound by a thread ready to be sewn.
And the Tracy Lord of Katharine Hepburn she bounces between the assembly lines, unsure whether to abandon forever a husband ready to take her back (CK Dexter Haven, played by Gary Grant) or marry the rich George Kittredge as planned, or even give in to the flattery of the journalist Macaulay Connor (James Stewart). Comedy of errors, sealed by hilarious moments and caustic irony, Scandal in Philadelphia although it takes up and reiterates a plot already exploited in golden Hollywood, re-semantizes the concept of a love triangle from a more comical perspective and engaging, devoid of sensuality, but still alive, human, credible. A closeness between screen and audience made possible above all by that acting charisma that only performers like Hepburn, Stewart and Grant could boast.
Jules and Jim by François Truffaut (1962)
«Jim thought: we have played with the substance of life, and we have lost». This is how the narrator of one of François Truffaut’s most beloved and acclaimed films comments in a firm yet emotional tone: Jules & Jim. If Jim’s is a challenge with life, Truffaut’s film is not afraid to reveal every obstacle, limit and satisfaction founding this personal Odyssey. Jules & Jim it’s not just a story about a woman and her inability to choose between two men: it’s a story of friendship, set before, during and after the First World War, with a wedding and the birth of a child in between. A work shot with a crew of only fifteen people in Paris, where it all began around 1912. The German Jules and the Frenchman Jim became inseparable friends united by a passion for literature, languages and women.
Fate will put Catherine on their path: Jules is attracted to her and warns Jim that he doesn’t want to share her with him. The friend withdraws but, after the conflict that puts them on opposite sides, the two meet again. Now the couple lives in the countryside and a little girl, Sabine, was born. But Catherine no longer loves Jules; Jim steps forward and Jules can’t help but accept the situation. That of Jules, Jim and Catherine is a vortex that takes, attracts, slams their bodies together like the lustful condemned men of the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno; it’s that “tourbillon de la vie” sung by Moreu who fascinates, makes you know, lose sight of, find again and make you fall in love, between unexpected events and heartbeats that now stop, then start again, to the rhythm of music orchestrated by emotions. Music without a happy ending.
Y tu mamá también by Alfonso Cuarón (2001)
It’s not a postcard Mexico And your mother too, because the earth immortalized by Alfonso Cuarón’s camera strips itself of improving filters, of fragments from earthly paradises, to take an interest in the bodies that inhabit that world. I am the disillusioned dreams, the search for one’s place in the world, the insecurities and uncertainties of young people, who set out among joints, sex, faithful friendships and bitter epilogues to act as the driving force behind the work of the Mexican director. Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) are two seventeen-year-old friends who long for adulthood.
They desire it, they wait for it, because they are incapable of being simple kids. During a party they meet a twenty-eight year old Spanish woman, Louisa (Luisa Cortés), who with a spirit of adventure agrees to travel together with the two (who in the meantime have begun to court her) towards a beach called Boca del Cielo that neither Julio nor Tenoch they know where he is. You will thus take it there a personal quest, a coming of age in the form of a journeywhere unbridled hedonism, pleasure, eroticism, the love triangle, laughter and tears will never act as protective shields against the passage of pain. Suffering will always find a free passage to infect beauty of life, and all of us, just like Cuarón’s protagonists, cannot help but accept it. After all, “life is like foam: for this reason we must abandon ourselves like the sea“.
The Dreamers by Bernardo Bertolucci (2003)
Bernardo Bertolucci was a courageous director. With his works he has never feared the judgment of others: he has dared, challenged, and at times won against a certain hypocritically right-thinking and somewhat bigoted and modest thought of both yesterday and today. Catholic morality bends and breaks before the Parma director’s camera; a look, his, that takes everything in and cloaks it in eroticism, just like his favorite student will do, that Luca Guadagnino who owes so much to Bernardo Bertolucci. And in fact there is a lot of Bertolucci and his The Dreamers in Challengersas well as in The Dreamers there is a lot of that cinematic current – the New Wave – which greatly influenced and marked the work of the director who passed away in 2018.
More than the love triangle of moral denunciation that lives between the connections of Obsession by Luchino Visconti, or by Chronicle of a love by Michelangelo Antonioni, in The Dreamers breathe the memories of Jules and Jim And Bands à Part; a gratitude that is never veiled, but made explicit with continuous quotations, which further reinforces the sense of obsession, dependence and fear of the bonds that flows in the mènage à trois between the brothers Isabelle (Eva Green) and Theo (Louis Garrell), and the American Matthew (Michael Pitt).
Paris not only becomes the backdrop to the student protests of 1968, but rises to a pulsating, living, almost tangible body, which inspires the vortex of the revolution, to graft it into the space of a living relationship with that freedom (especially sexual) shouted by many, requested, and not always obtained. Between dreams in the form of 24 frames per secondto the aesthetic beauty of art and the bodies portrayed by it, up to obsession, the sexual drive, the release of social inhibitions, The Dreamers it becomes a carousel of anarchy and declaration of freedom, youth and emotional dependence, phobias and fears that accompany the young people of yesterday as well as those of today. All dreamers cradled by the (at times disillusioned) hope of tomorrow.
Iron 3 – Kim Ki Duk’s Empty House (2004)
In sporting terms, the “3 iron” is a golf club, statistically the least used, the most ignored. Just as ignored, invisible to the eyes, learn to be the protagonist of the film of Kim Ki-Duk, Iron 3 – The empty house, presented at the 2004 Venice Film Festival. the protagonist Tae-suk is a shadow who walks undisturbed through the streets of the night; homeless, he finds a place to temporarily call home in temporarily empty homes.
But Tae-suk does not steal, does not ruin, does not destroy; Tae-suk inhabits the rooms, fills them by substituting the lives of others. And for a moment he too takes the place of lover and husband for Sunhwa, a young woman mistreated by her partner and met by chance in a luxurious villa mistakenly believed to be empty. As she feeds the plants, or mends pots, Tae-suk also restores a heart that had stopped beating. Together with Sunhwa he forms a unique relationship, of mutual feeling, destined to open up to that third external element who, thanks to the optical illusionism games learned by the young man in prison, will be blind to Tae-suk’s presence. And so the two will be able to kiss literally behind their husband’s back of Sunhwa, imagining that that triangle will once again become a red thread that will forever unite the two young people. Despite the beatings, despite the exciting fear of being discovered.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
No daydreams in the streets of Paris at night; nor the mental ruminations left to wander in New York traffic. It is now the city of Barcelona to become a warm heart and wet arms ready to cradletighten, the body of the protagonists of Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Cinema returns for Woody Allen to become a notebook in which to write down one’s own psychoanalytic sessions, listening, marking, recording on film, one’s own reflections on what we insist on calling and identifying as love, but which perhaps is nothing other than a simple magic trick, an illusion of the sensesa spectacle of the heart against the mind.
Challenging reason, tradition, collective identities and moral values acquired by the social construct that encompasses us, – but perhaps never fully internalized – the director exploits the love triangle between Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) and Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) to translate into visual language the desires, obsessions, traumas and emotional dependencies that we carry within us, to the point of tearing us apart and exploding our relationships with others. Without much subterfuge, the work declares from the beginning, starting from the explicit force of its title, that the triangle will draw the boundaries of your story: a continuous triangle, which self-reproduces into many, constant, triangles. There is the one between Juan Antonio, Vicky and her boyfriend/husband, the original one, between Cristina, Juan Antonio and his impetuous ex-wife María Elena. Like magnets, bodies attract each other and then move away, in a game of seduction and transgression questioned, held back and hindered by bourgeois thought.
