3 Movies of Love and Nostalgia

Some romantic relationships mark us for life and even if they’ve ended a while ago, they’ve left a profound imprint on us. This is so strong that the feelings we’ve experienced will remain forever as part of who we are in the form of nostalgia. Unconsciously, this memory will condition what we expect, need and avoid in subsequent relationships. 

Many films reflect these kinds of experiences and through the stories we see on the screen they make us feel once again those sensations that were lying dormant. They activate our “nostalgic nodes” (as behavioral psychologists would say) through certain keys like looks, outbursts and laments.

We’re going to recommend three films that will act as these keys. They are ideal if you want to remember that which is beautiful and painful at the same time — nostalgia.

The English Patient

Some love stories on the screen are nice, pleasant and simple. However, others are all or nothing, a gentle brush that strokes a knife of simultaneously the most passionate and the most toxic love.

This is the case of the film “The English Patient” which transports us to the the story of two hidden lovers that betray tradition. They do this by passionately surrendering into the uncertainty of mystery.

Their love is heated and their passion spreads through the desert setting of their tragic, unique destiny. In the story of a man burnt in his own skin, we see how his memories have not acquired the bitterness of the ashes.

They are conserved in the music, in the darkness of a cave and in the magnitude of a thimble. All the good and beautiful things that in the light can embrace a man with a past full of too many shadows. The love seems to save him from the pain and make him feel safe to face death with the certainty of having experienced true beauty.

Cinema Paradiso

What would become of the lovers of nostalgia and cinema if “Cinema Paradiso” didn’t exist? It would have to be invented! Seeing “Cinema Paradiso” is like biting into a piece of the most beautiful nostalgia that makes you remember your childhood (especially if it was beautiful and full of movies). Taking it in with the beauty of the landscape and the Italian music as you feel the most pure and innocent love of the young, provincial Totó for Elena.

We won’t say that the movie is all sugar and good omens. It is difficult and even scary to see a man so marked by his first love that his feelings have never been able to be unfaithful to that nostalgia. It is beautiful and sad at once.

The last scene appears as a metaphor: there is beauty in all their kisses, but the ones that were censured or hidden are also exciting, even if they come with the price of happiness itself in later life. An emotionally-mortgaged later life as a result of a full-blown investment with no guarantees in the height of youth.

The Bridges of Madison County

If a first love can mark someone’s life forever, a mature love having lived with a partner without having ever really felt passion could be even more nostalgic when you become aware of it.

It reminds you of everything you once could have had and that social conventions and “emotional responsibilities” snatched away from you. “The Bridges of Madison County” is a captivating story in which a woman with a stable life surrenders to her instinct for the first time in her life, without feeling like she’s going crazy.

A woman who feels simple, insignificant and irrelevant, face-to-face with a man “of the world”, who discovers that perhaps he had never experienced in any of his travels such fervor and movement inside himself as he did together with this simple housewife. A movie that reflects the absurdity of love, relationships and couples: millions of people in couples who don’t love each other and thousands of true lovers and accomplices who are separated.