I was absolutely fascinated by the story and its characters, mainly Hedda, of course. It was quite a challenge, both intellectually and emotionally, to step in this odd version of love and romantic connection and see the way the characters relate to love and their strange definition and understanding of emotional bonding, which takes extreme, violent turns. What I find striking is that there are many who might identify themselves with Hedda's ex-boyfriend in terms of all that longing for flawless complementing and wholeness with the loved one, however, it is the specific expression of this feeling, as well as a certain healthy state of passivity, that makes the difference and separates people on the safe side of the edge from those on the other side, who fall, hurt and get hurt because they no longer possess an objective sense of what is tangible. When Hedda says: "The table was no longer a table", we may as well understand that her skin was no longer skin, a matter of skin tissues, when his ex was battering her, it may as well have been paper or cotton, and that the pain she was feeling in the process was not actually pain, but equaled love and reaching out for it. So, the limits between concepts like love, pain, sharing and intimacy, and their definitions, as well as the usual adjectives/ stereotypes attached to them get just as fuzzy and confused as the characters. The characters are placed on the scene and left on their own to grow throughout the story and to reveal themselves progressively, quite similar to a canvas painting process. The movie has a beautifully slow, bluesy rhythm, with moving flash-backs and a heart-breaking climax when Hedda makes her final confession regarding her personal feeling of privilege in the context of her ex-lover's violence. Robin Wright Penn makes a terrific job of portraying Hedda as a graceful, pretty fragile and floaty presence of a kind, tender nature, a woman who would have been just a regular person if it hadn't been for her past relationship and the emotional and psychological entanglements derived from it. Her ex is not the bad guy of the story, but a tragic soul who simply doesn't know where to stop and can't conceive drawing lines between the separate selves and territories when loving someone deeply.
Review of Loved
