Twenty years have passed since the release of the film "Punch-Drunk Love." This unusual romantic comedy from one of America's greatest contemporary directors is a small film that stands out from Paul Thomas Anderson's filmography and at the same time...
Many seem to miss this, but besides the eternal Freudian conflict with the father figure, the desire to capture an era, and the exploration of phobias, manias, and psychoses, love occupies a crucial place in Paul Thomas's films. It connects the most unexpected characters in his pictures – a devout policeman and a cocaine addict ("Magnolia"), a hippie drug addict and his ex who appears out of nowhere ("Inherent Vice"), a card sharp and a prostitute ("Hard Eight") – and connects the films themselves, preventing them from falling apart, just as the consciousness of Anderson's characters disintegrates. So it's no surprise that one of the director's most tender and yet furious films turned out to be "Punch-Drunk Love," an absurd rom-com about an impossible feeling.
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"Before I met you, I called a phone sex line and four blonde brothers came for me. I had to leave again to make sure no one would touch you anymore. I also have a whole warehouse of pudding and in six or eight weeks I can get miles for it. If you agree to wait, I think there will be enough miles for me to fly everywhere with you, on all your business trips. Because I don't want to be apart from you for a second." No one can retell the plot of this film better than the main character Barry Egan (Adam Sandler's best role) in his rambling confession.
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Open material"Punch-Drunk Love" is indeed a film about how a neurotic, insecure businessman, harassed by his seven sisters, meets the love of his life, Lena Leonard (brilliant Emily Watson), his sister's colleague, while not-so-bright blonde brothers, hired by the owner of the "Mattress Man" store played by the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, try to shake $750 out of him.
The fact that there are four brothers, seven sisters, Sandler's character never parts with his blue suit (which doesn't quite fit him), and his beloved always dresses in red, carries some symbolism, even intentional, but unlike Anderson's other films, interpreting minor details, recognizing images and allusions in this film is almost entirely unimportant, reduced to entertainment—pleasant, but without which everything is still clear.
Due to stylistic similarities with Anderson's previous film, "Magnolia"—a grand canvas about love and hate—"Punch-Drunk Love" sometimes seems like a novella that didn't make it into that film, later edited separately: city life, loneliness, dysfunctional family, and attempts to escape oneself—all familiar themes are in place. But while "Magnolia" is a complexly composed film (so many stories, characters, locations) and complexly written (coming up with a good film with a rain of frogs in the finale is hardly simple), in "Punch-Drunk Love" Anderson stepped back from his penchant for three-hour narratives, making a story lasting an hour and a half, the shortest film in his career, and unlike "Magnolia," it's not about life being complicated, but rather about it being, in general, quite simple.
Not in the sense that the characters of "Punch-Drunk Love" have an especially easy life, no, of course: phone sex blackmails, sisters abuse, and the main character can't control his outbursts of aggression and periodically trashes other people's property. There are many problems, but where Anderson used to state disintegration, the impossibility of returning the past and correcting mistakes, in this film he unexpectedly casts aside the universal melancholy of the great American novel, remakes Wilder with cinematic language, and honestly, this is his first film after which you want to live.
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Open materialAt the same time, the film is brilliantly shot: Sandler acts like never before (and later he will act like that only once—in "Uncut Gems"), the hero's runs through narrow corridors can be rewatched endlessly, the scene with the call to the sex worker causes an almost physical sense of awkwardness. And the idea with the color and sound palettes, when avant-garde paintings by Jeremy Blake suddenly appear between parts of the film, eliminating the need to show the hero's inner state in dialogues, reveals Anderson as a devoted viewer of Antonioni—in his "Red Desert," the heroine's inner world was shown through the setting on screen.
In this seemingly simple film, everything is not so simple and a little different from what it seems. The piano turns out to be a harmonium; the terribly awkward Adam Sandler becomes a local John Wick, and what started as a classic rom-com becomes a story about a miracle. Love in this film is unmotivated, does not obey classic tropes: the characters were neither enemies, nor friends, nor colleagues; he is not a bookseller and she is not a movie star; he is a businessman, but not a rich one, and she is not Julia Roberts.
Love between the slightly eccentric Lena Leonard and the neurotic Barry Egan, who has never flown on a plane in his life but for some reason buys up pudding to get a million free miles (from the local "Aeroflot"), as it seems, should not exist, nothing led to it, but it happened. And this love, which turned the meaningless life of a modern person upside down, is shown by Anderson without any genre tricks, without explanations, precisely as a miracle. Which simply happened, although it seemed impossible. It is this strange, sincere understanding of love, far removed both from studio rom-coms and postmodern experiments, that makes the film so appealing and, in a sense, knocks you off your feet, of course.
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