Two Lovers belongs to a genre of motion pictures I like to call “folk films.” To me, this means they are about ordinary people, not superheroes or handsome men or extraordinary ghetto teachers who, against all odds, prepare their charges to go on to Stanford.
Folk films may end upbeat, but not win-the-lottery upbeat. Or, the endings may be bittersweet — a little bit of happiness and a little bit of sadness. Above all, the ending, whether upbeat or a downer, is believable — not Hollywood believable but Fresno believable.
The preeminent folk film is Marty, the 1955 piece of realism directed by Delbert Mann and starring Ernest Borgnine, a butcher, and Betsy Blair, a schoolteacher. Both are plain-looking by Hollywood standards, but that is the point of the film: how ordinary people fall in love and find each other despite the disapproval of Marty’s (Borgnine’s) loveless and hypocritical friends. Unadorned as it was, lacking in big stars, Marty still won four Academy Awards and the Palme d’Or award at Cannes.
Some directors are naturally drawn to folk films. Kelly Reichardt has made at least two so far, Old Joy and the recent Wendy and Lucy. These films feel like slices of life.
Old Joy, released in 2006, is about two 30-something men, once close friends, who have taken different paths in life. Mark abandoned the bohemian life to settle down and start a family. Kurt still plays the hippie. He shows up at Mark’s place and talks him into going camping with him in the Cascades. But they are distant in a way neither can explain. Time is the culprit.
Wendy and Lucy, released in 2008, is one of the shortest feature films ever made. It runs only 75 minutes and tells the understated story of a young woman, Wendy, on the road, bound, she says, for the canneries of Alaska. But she runs into misfortune in Oregon. Her car breaks downs irretrievably and her dog disappears. She thus becomes eerily vulnerable. You have to read into this film: why she left Indiana in the first place, how she will fare riding the rails, etc.
Two international films that invariably make Top 10 best-ever lists of critics worldwide are The Bicycle Thief and Pather Panchali. Both are folk films. The former, released in 1948, tells the simple story of a man in poverty-stricken, post-war Italy whose bicycle has been stolen. If he can’t find it, he can’t go to work, and his family will starve. The latter, from India and released in 1955, tells an equally unadorned story about surviving the elements and human stupidity in Bengal, and a boy growing up amid it all.
Through the years, Filmworks has shown a few folk films. Half Nelson, about a drug addicted history teacher in Brooklyn; Frozen River, about two poor women who think they can make a few bucks smuggling undocumented immigrants through Canada into the U.S.; and Killer of Sheep, set in the African-American community of Watts, Calif., about the workaday desperation of poor folk.
Two Lovers, too, is about working-class people and familiar if difficult life choices. Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Leonard, the main character, isn’t heroic working in his parents’ dry-cleaning establishment. But he’s all too human. Then two women come into his life. The results are believable.