ABSTRACT
The four films the author have grouped under the heading "Love and lust", depict a spectrum that includes limerence, perversion, romance, stalking, affection, delusion, obsession, seduction, reverence, the myriad permutations of these and other variants of desire. The couple in An Affair of Love, initially strangers, meet for the purpose of enacting a perverse fantasy. The results of projection and introjection are even more remarkable in Certified Copy, which develops entirely according to the characters' unstable expectations of each other, with scarcely any attention to external conditions. Of the four films, Talk to Her departs most radically in representing the convolutions of desire by focusing on relations in which one of the two partners is comatose. Gods and Monsters begin with clash of assumptions between the two principal characters: James Whale assumes that Clayton Boone is a brute whose homophobia can be exploited into murder.
