In the Rodin Museum in Paris, there is a guided tour of
Rodin’s most famous work The Kiss – and how he laboured for years to get the
pose and symbiosis between the man and woman absolutely right. Rodin’s
masterpiece remains one of the most recognisable and downright sexy pieces of
art in the world today.
In cinema, the kiss is the culmination of longing, desire
and a hot ante pasti to sex. Modern film depicts the leads grabbing each other
and eating each other hungrily. But the kiss used to be much more than that; it
once meant more than mere kissing.
The kiss used to be THE MOMENT –when we saw the two leads,
finally at long last, give in to their absolute need to just hold each other
for dear life and their lips met in a passionate but by today’s standards,
chaste embrace. More often than not the dialogue was the most romantic and
unforgettable that replayed over and over again in our heads.
Now Voyager: "Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have
the stars!"
Gone with the Wind: "You need to be kissed and often. And by
someone who knows how!"
Casablanca – "Kiss me as if it were the last time"
Wow, hotdog – can you imagine if you were to kiss someone as
if it were the last time? One has to wonder if modern audiences could even
fathom the sheer breadth of that request.
The technique of old where language and WHAT the leads were
saying to each other has been lost, I would argue, completely. Today’s main
characters are portrayed as brazen, cynical and blasé about most things, and
instead of vulnerability we get moral insensibility, so how can something like
a kiss mean very much?
I watched The Notebook over and over again and I wondered
where the intelligent stuff had gone. I found it laughable when he said that he
wrote ‘365 letters’. He wrote her ‘every day for a year.’ Thanks for
enlightening us on the length of a year.
What if he had said instead: “I can’t believe you just
disappeared. Left. Forgot about me. Us. There was never a day that I didn’t
think of you. And what we lost.’
Somehow modern day romance is puerile and frankly,
forgettable. The stuff we really
remember in film (and that’s why we got the movies to be moved, inspired,
entertained but mostly removed from our hum drum lives) is the moment when he
just gives in: he looks at her, she looks at him and there is a sudden
realisation that mere words cannot express what is running thorough their
minds. And the KISS is everything. Because that’s when the barrier, the
sandpit, the dyke, whatever you want to call it, is broached, and wham, real
intimacy begins. The kiss, in a sense, is an act of honesty.
Hollywood often mistakes this silent complicity between a
man and woman who are ultimately hot for each other, and instead of language,
gives us the lunge. There is no other way to describe modern day kissing. Like
fast food, it seems to be something that people need to do fast as if in a
great hurry. Are they in such a rush to be somewhere else?
The truth is we wait the whole darn film for some sign that
they’re going to get together. And when they do is it either the anticlimax of
our expectations or something extraordinary. Clint and Meryl in Bridges of
Madison County – now that was some ‘meeting of the minds’! All the copulation
was done off screen and what we got was one of the best lingering, long
romantic moments with the kiss that spoke many, many words. Mind you there was
a lot of background dialogue in the song playing which was highly evocative but
Client and Meryl clearly had all the time in the world to explore and savour
that first kiss.
Contrast that moment with say, Matt Damon in The Bourne
Identity and the whole; ‘wow factor’ of emotion just begins to seem tawdry.
And that is essentially the problem with romance in film
these days. Men and women on screen seem to say little and emote in action not
in words. Why can’t the kiss be the best moment of the film like it used to be?
Now it s the inevitable par for the course moment but we don’t feel anything.
No one seems to get lost in each other anymore.
And instead of kissing we get that ridiculous simulated sex.
Now honestly – sex is pretty dramatic stuff and best-done behind closed doors.
To watch two people simulating sex is a bit like drinking a skinny latte in the
North Pole. It's a barely there moment without much sustenance. One has to ask
– what’s the point?
Consider the sexiest moment on screen – Rhett Butler grabs
Scarlet in his arms and carries her up the sprawling staircase. Cut to the next
morning as she lays contentedly in his arms. Did we need to see anything?
Real romance, sex, and lust, in fact the whole nine yards,
is in the kiss. It is the longed-for silent moment where speaking just doesn’t
seem to mean as much as the meeting of two lips and the locking of two souls –
it is a prelude. The real thing because face it, we don’t lock lips with
strangers on the train or the bus. But it’s the one thing that we dream of
doing with the person we fancy the pants off.
And please, can we have real kissing!!!! THE TYPE WHERE HIS
LIPS AND HER LIPS ARE BANG ON TOP OF EACH OTHER. None of this half nibbling of
the nose or upper lip. Golly, where did this excuse for a smooch come from? If
we want the kiss to be big and eloquent and orgasmic without the carnal
knowledge (just yet), it has got to be HUGE in scale – sultry, desperate, life
affirming, breathless to the point that they couldn’t bear to stop but will
have to (or they’ll both pass out). Close your eyes and fantasise about the
person you would most like to kiss and imagine WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT, the
blink-or-you’d-miss-it smooch would be!
Longing is exactly that – something that should take a long
time. The kiss is the big moment in the film, the entrée as it were, not the side
order. It’s the unspoken word of love.
Copyright Samantha van Dalen. This article first appeared on shadowlocked.com - a really excellent movie website.
Photo and Painting Copyright SvD.
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