Movies - Truly, Madly, Deeply

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Truly, Madly, Deeply

	Movies - Truly, Madly, Deeply

Truly, Madly, Deeply is a British romance film, made in 1990 for the BBC's Screen One series. It was written and directed by Anthony Minghella and stars Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, both up-and-coming stars at the time of its making. Minghella has said he wrote the script specifically as "a vehicle for to express all her talents. She plays piano, likes dancing and has a quirky side to her which she usually can't express in the classical parts she is asked for" ().

The title comes from a verbal word game played by the main characters in which they challenge each other to take turns repeating and adding to a series of adverbs describing how much they love each other.

Plot

Nina, an interpreter, is beside herself with grief at the recent death of her boyfriend, Jamie, a cellist. When it appears that she is no longer able to cope with life, Jamie suddenly comes back, as a ghost, and moves in with her again. Ecstatically happy, Nina is able to begin living normally again, although their relationship is put under strain by his erratic behaviour such as moving furniture around and inviting fellow ghosts back to their flat. She meets Mark (Michael Maloney), a social worker, to whom she is attracted, but she is unwilling to become involved with him because of Jamie's continued presence. Jamie, seeing her settled at last, says goodbye to leave her to live with Mark.

Themes and motifs

The main theme is communication. Nina is a professional interpreter, working in a language agency and surrounded by people who often fail to make themselves understood to each other; the ghost of Jamie reveals he has been spending his time learning Spanish, and sometimes speaks to her in a "terrible" accent; at one point Nina goes to Mark's workplace and communicates with him with hand gestures through a window; Jamie and Nina's relationship ultimately suffers because they fail to communicate with each other.

A repeated visual motif is clouds - when Nina and a language student go out walking they talk about clouds; Jamie refers to a metal cloud mobile he gave Nina; and the clouds themselves refer to heaven and Jamie's death.

The characters also have social and political concerns. Nina first meets Mark in a cafe where a waiter, an illegal immigrant, explains to her he is being underpaid by his boss, and she intervenes in the argument (and translates for the waiter). Jamie also says: "That capacity to love that people have - what happens to it? I blame the government." When Nina asks him what he means he says, "I hate the bastards" and claims he still attends Party meetings, despite being dead.

Stylistically the film makes several nods to magic realism and metaphor, in the sense that some of the scenes depicted are not actually happening except in the characters' imaginations. This is principally demonstrated through Jamie "returning" to live with Nina. Elsewhere, action is depicted by showing a subjective and imaginative version of the events rather than by describing them in mundane detail, such as the cafe scene in which Mark intervenes in the dispute and resolves the argument by appearing to perform a magic trick in which, à propos of nothing, he makes a dove fly out from his coat sleeve.

Comparison with Ghost

Although often referred to as "the British Ghost" (most famously by Ian Hislop, who described it as "Ghost for people who can do crosswords"), its plot really bears no resemblance to that of the Hollywood movie.

Awards

The film won Minghella a Bafta for best original screenplay.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Truly, Madly, Deeply ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Truly, Madly, Deeply; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay