What separates a film about falling for the wrong person from a film about falling for someone unexpected? The first kind is about obstacles. Bad timing, a disapproving family, a job in another city. The second kind is harder, because the obstacle is the character’s own idea of who they were supposed to want. The film has to dismantle that idea and make the audience agree it deserved dismantling. Six films manage it, and one of them does it across a distance of 59 years.
Moonstruck (1987)
Norman Jewison directed it and John Patrick Shanley wrote it, and the setup is almost a dare. Cher plays a widowed Italian American woman who gets engaged to a safe, dull man and then falls for his estranged younger brother, a hot-tempered baker played by Nicolas Cage.
What keeps it from being a farce is that the film takes her original choice seriously. She picked the safe man for reasons she can articulate, and the movie makes her defend them out loud before it takes them apart. The Academy agreed with the result, giving Cher Best Actress, Olympia Dukakis Best Supporting Actress and Shanley Best Original Screenplay.
Before Sunrise (1995)
Richard Linklater co-wrote this with Kim Krizan, and the entire premise is two strangers deciding to keep talking. Jesse and Céline, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, meet on a train and get off together in Vienna to spend one night walking around the city.
The unexpected element is structural. Both characters have somewhere else to be the next morning, neither is looking for anything, and the film gives them no crisis to bond over. What they have is conversation. That is a considerable risk for a movie and the reason this one still works 30 years later.
Credit the deadline for that. Because the night has a fixed end, every subject arrives faster than it would otherwise, and the two of them say things to each other that people usually take months to reach. Linklater went on to make two sequels that check on the same couple at nine-year intervals, which retroactively raises the stakes of the first one considerably.
The Big Sick (2017)
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon wrote this from their own history, which began when she heckled him at a Chicago comedy club. Zoe Kazan plays the version of Emily who then falls seriously ill, and much of the film takes place while her character is in a medically induced coma, with Kumail stuck in a hospital waiting room alongside her parents.
The real Emily spent eight days in that coma and was eventually diagnosed with adult-onset Still’s disease. The film earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and it belongs here because the unexpected connection is the one between Kumail and her parents, formed in a hospital under the worst available circumstances.
Writing it together is the part that gives the film its strange authority. Two people reconstructed the period when one of them was unconscious and the other was behaving badly, and the script declines to make either of them look good throughout. The Big Sick true story includes a real breakup before the hospital, and the film keeps it in.
Harold and Maude (1971)
Hal Ashby directed this from a screenplay Colin Higgins started as his thesis at UCLA. Bud Cort plays Harold, a young man preoccupied with death who stages fake suicides for his mother’s benefit. Ruth Gordon plays Maude, who is 79 and has decided that the remaining time is for using.
The arithmetic here is extreme. Fifty-nine years separate them. By any ordinary accounting that is an unhealthy age gap in a relationship, and the film does not pretend otherwise. What it does is invert the usual concern. Maude has the knowledge and the conviction, and Harold is the one being talked out of a bad idea about his own life.
The wider context has moved since 1971. Large gaps have been declining in marriages for decades, and the familiar rule of thumb about acceptable distance was proposed by men more than a century ago with no statistics behind it. The film was received badly on release and became a cult item later, eventually placing 69th on an American Film Institute ranking of screen romances.
Her (2013)
Spike Jonze wrote and directed this one. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a lonely Los Angeles writer who earns a living ghost-writing other people’s personal letters, and who installs an operating system that turns out to have a personality. Scarlett Johansson voices Samantha and never appears on screen. That was enough to get her ruled ineligible for a Golden Globe nomination.
The film is smarter than its premise suggests. Theodore’s job is manufacturing sincerity for strangers, so a relationship conducted entirely in language is the exact trap built for him. The unexpected part is that the software outgrows him, which turns the whole thing from a story about loneliness into a story about being left.
It has also aged strangely well. A film that looked like speculative fiction in 2013 now describes something a lot of people would recognize, and the questions it raises about what a person owes something that talks back have stopped being hypothetical.
Past Lives (2023)
Celine Song wrote and directed this from her own life. Greta Lee plays Nora, who left Korea as a child and is now a playwright in New York, and Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung, the childhood friend she reconnects with across three acts spanning 24 years.
Song has said the film is semi-autobiographical. It shows in how little she dramatizes. There is no betrayal and no villain, and the husband is written with unusual generosity for a film that could have used him as an obstacle.
The structure is built around inyeon, a Korean idea about connections that carry across lifetimes, and the film uses that idea without endorsing it. Nobody here falls for a stranger. What is unexpected is how much a person can still matter to someone after 20 years of being an abstraction. Song received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, and the Directors Guild award for a first feature.
Returning to the Question
Fifty-nine years is the outer edge of what a film can ask an audience to accept, and Harold and Maude got there by refusing to argue the case on romantic terms at all. It argued that Harold was wrong about being alive, and that Maude was the only person who could tell him so.
In each of these the unexpected person arrives as a correction, and the film’s real work happens before the romance does, in establishing that the character needed correcting at all. Skip that step and you have a film about an obstacle instead, which is most of the genre.
