If Music Be The Food Of Love.... Wicker Park

I constantly wonder why meaningful, intimate and beautifully filmed movies like Wicker Park get such bad ratings at sites like rottentomatoes.com. What could they miss that critics need so much that they just can't appreciate what the movies actually do present? Wicker Park, for example is a warm, alluring film about the perfect love's haunting impression which never lets you rest, always comes back with the same wonderful memories which are even more powerful now that they are only that.

If the label you're looking for is "realistic", don't watch this movie, because the plot indeed uses fate and coincidence as an anchor to revolve its story around, but if you accept the fact that this is fiction which has its own inner rules and doesn't show us life in its fullest, then you could really enjoy it. Also, according to the main idea, searching for a long lost love(er), the cinematographic method used here indicates very well the fragmentation of how we remember and think, the way our thoughts bounce back and forth in our memory, from the present into the past and back again. And a lost and painful love story is necessarily shown in brighter, nostalgic hues, like all good memories we wish we'd still live in.

The excellent photography which makes the film so captivating is only overshadowed by the very well chosen music which gives life to the scenes. Shakespeare's appropriate quote isn't just random, it's indeed easier to get drawn into the story with powerful and original tracks echoing in our ears all the time. The music gives the movie a veritable atmosphere of longing and obsession, while another character learns about love and starts obsessing about it from one of the Master's dramas, Twelfth Night, if I'm not mistaken. 

And, dear critics, you'd love this, the film even has some messages beyond the conventional story line, in the use of media devices: Matt, the protagonist falls in love into a video taped Lisa, the phone also functions as an entity bringing together and tearing them apart again, we get a sense of distance and alienation so present in today's big cities, where places only have meanings when people are around, and finding someone by going into their apartment isn't an option any more.  So if you want to watch a powerful love thriller (strange enough, in that genre nobody ever complains about having too obvious coincidences) with strangely delightful pictures and an eerie soundtrack which will haunt you for days, take a look at this earlier masterpiece of the director who hit the jackpot with Lucky Number Slevin.