Two lovers

Third movie, with popcorn, yet still long night, it were just 9 pm............. mmmm well I think it's the last one from my side, last romantic one..........
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix , Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw , Moni Moshonov ,Isabella Rossellini and Elias Koteas
Directed by James Gray

“Two Lovers” deals with the romantic ambivalence of a young man in Brooklyn The life of Leonard Kraditor might seem ordinary, even drab — he lives with his parents, works for his father’s dry-cleaning business, dabbles in photography — but his desires and sorrows, his fundamental confusion about who he should be, certainly don’t feel trivial to him.

Hardly a feckless youth, Leonard is in his early 30s, with a breakup and a breakdown (involving a suicide attempt) just behind him. Played with twitchy sensitivity by Joaquin Phoenix, Leonard is by turns raw and benumbed, at once comforted and smothered by the homey claustrophobia of life with his tactful old-world dad (Moni Moshonov) and his hovering, anxious mother (Isabella Rossellini).

Though it is set in the present, “Two Lovers” takes place in what often feels like an earlier incarnation of New York, a world of lower-middle-class neighborhoods and workaday aspirations .

Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) is focused on his inner demons. His fiancee left him -- dumped him --and he has moved back to his childhood room, still with the "2001" poster on the wall. He makes customer deliveries for his dad's dry cleaning business— he struggles with the conflicting demands of filial duty and the longing to strike out on his own. He wants to be a good son, but he also wants to live a life of danger, freedom and impulse. Does he stick with his own kind and risk suffocation, or does he risk rootlessness in pursuit of liberation?

These choices are hardly abstract. They are embodied by two women who contend for Leonard’s attention and affection and who also, to some extent, conform to the ancient archetypes identified by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler of the Good Good Girl and the Good Bad Girl.

Vinessa Shaw plays Sandra, the girl Leonard might have brought home to mother if mother hadn’t brought her home first. She’s the daughter of an important business associate of Leonard’s father, and if she and Leonard paired off, there would be advantages all around. Luckily for Leonard, Sandra is also kind, smart, patient and very sexy. I believe Sandra senses something is damaged about Leonard. "Two Lovers" never puts a word to it, although we know he's had treatment and is on medication. It's not a big showy mental problem; lots of people go through life like this, and people simply say, "Well, you know Leonard." But Sandra does know him, and that's why she tells him she not only loves him, but wants to help him.


But he can’t help but be distracted by Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a willowy blonde who turns up, to Leonard’s amazement and his mother’s undisguised horror, in their apartment building. Michelle is an exotic transplant in the outer-borough soil, filling Leonard’s nose with the Manhattany perfume of sophistication and sexual adventure. She is also needy, capricious and a little unstable, which allows Leonard’s fantasy of escape to be twinned with a dream of rescue. Michelle is the mistress of a rich, married lawyer (Elias Koteas), and she turns to Leonard as a brotherly confidant even as her vulnerability seems to offer the chance for something more.


Leonard's parents are Ruth and Reuben Kraditor (Isabella Rosselliniand Moni Monoshov), long-married, staunchly bourgeois, reasonable. Ruth of course wants Leonard to find stability in marriage with a nice Jewish girl like Sandra, but her love for him outweighs her demands on him -- rare in the movies. Reuben is more narrow in his imagination for his son, but not a caricature. And Sandra's father (Bob Ari) wants to buy the Kraditor business and likes the idea of a marriage but would never think of his daughter as part of a business deal. Everyone in the film wants the best for their children.

Structurally “Two Lovers” is a romantic comedy, with complications and misunderstandings accelerating toward a big decision. But while there are moments of humor — and a sublimely witty, almost surreal performance from Ms. Rossellini — the overall mood is earnest and anguished.
well its little bit strange film, synical , and its end is little mm strange..........but nice