Six Films in Which Someone 
Is Just Not That Into the 
Protagonist


By Matt Prigge 
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jul. 21, 2009

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The Phantom of the Opera (1925): Unrequited love: banal, monotonous, annoying even to those suffering from 
it. That’s not to say, artistically, it’s off-limits. One of horror’s most iconic baddies offers a particularly unattractive portrayal of a sufferer: not only a deformed freak, but a social recluse and a homicidal maniac.


The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943): In Powell and Pressburger’s small-sized epic, Roger Livesey’s warmonger falls, as a young man, for a woman played by Deborah Kerr; she, alas, falls for his German officer pal Anton Walbrook. So he falls in love, over the ensuing decades, with different characters also played by Kerr.


Vertigo (1958): It’s reductive to describe what ails Jimmy Stewart’s “Scottie” as mere “unrequited love”; it’s so much more fucked up than that. But Hitchcock’s most personal and unnerving film offers valuable insight into this defect, suggesting that the person with whom someone is infatuated does not, in a sense, really exist.


The Story of Adele H. (1975): At his most detached and calm, François Truffaut relates the shrill tale of Victor Hugo’s daughter (Isabelle Adjani), who wasted her long life doting on, stalking and pestering a British lieutenant ( Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson) who couldn’t be less reciprocative.


Being John Malkovich (1999): It’s not only that Catherine Keener’s just not that into John Cusack’s puppeteer; she’s cartoonishly hostile toward his pathetic advances. (And in love with his wife. Sorta.) Cusack’s antics become increasingly violent and extreme, resulting in a comeuppance that should turn any obsessee coldly rational.


(500) Days of Summer (2009): Early on, Zooey Deschanel bluntly informs Joseph Gordon-Levitt that she’s not into -into him. He then delusionally enters into a disastrous pseudo-relationship. Filmmaking-wise, it’s too cute by half, but don’t underestimate a bubbly rom-com that preaches this: Don’t be smitten with those who aren’t smitten back.

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Posted Jul. 21, 2009 | Comments: 2