“When we play the piano four-handed, we play our partner, we can converse, even during a concert. It’s profoundly intimate… With four hands, we can deeply feel the other person, their sensitivity, the pulse of their heart.” Alexandre Tharaud
It is often said that the opposite of love is hate. Perhaps this is one of the most unfair things we say about love.
Hate still demands attention. To hate someone, we need to keep paying attention to them, remember what they did, allow their existence to provoke something within us.
Perhaps the true opposite of love is indifference. Or, even worse, habit.
Because few things are as dangerous in a relationship as the moment we stop discovering the person beside us. We know their quirks, their flaws, what they're going to say before they even say it. We know so much about them that we start to believe we know everything.
And perhaps that's precisely where we stop getting to know her. That's what she talks about, much more than sex. The Invite, by Olivia Wilde. The Invite adapts the Spanish film Sentimental, by Cesc Gay, which, in turn, originated from the play Los vecinos de arriba, written by the director himself. The genealogy is felt: few characters, a closed space, and the word as the main weapon. Cinema opens the apartment door for us, but it is the theatre that remains seated at the table.
With this theatrical premise, Joe and Angela invite their upstairs neighbors, Hawk and Piña, for dinner. One group has been married for years and has transformed intimacy into a succession of petty hostilities. The other group has sex loud enough to go through the ceiling.
Four people. One apartment. One night. And a dangerously large number of things that should never be said at the dinner table.
When Hawk and Piña propose a four-way sexual experience, what they're putting on the table isn't just the possibility of partner swapping. They're bringing in a mirror. And Joe and Angela don't like what they see.
I really liked it. Seth Rogen, Permanently restless, as if Joe could never be comfortable in his own body. The embarrassment and nervous laughter that Rogen so often used for humor hide resentment here. He wanted to be a musician, ended up a teacher, and looks at his own life as a diminished version of the one he imagined. Angela has become merely the closest face onto which to project this disillusionment.
Olivia Wilde She responds with an impatient, longing Angela, almost desperate to find something. She tidies, organizes, controls, perhaps because she still believes that putting the house in order can do the same for her life. When we discover that she is showing herself naked in front of the window, the gesture seems to me less erotic than sad.
Angela doesn't just need to be desired. She needs to know that she is still seen.
Penelope Cruz She perfectly understands that Piña doesn't need to compete with Angela. Her sensuality is precisely the opposite of exhibitionism. It's in her voice, her gaze, the serenity with which she speaks of things that make others uncomfortable. And it's also, let's face it, in two other "details" that I'll leave you the pleasure of discovering when you see the film :P. The more naturally Piña considers sex, the less she needs to sexualize herself.
And then it appears Edward Norton. For me, it is in him that the key to understanding lies. The Invite to another level.
Throughout much of his extraordinary career, Norton seemed fascinated by men who hid another man inside themselves (and don't be mean, I'm not talking about Asteroid City :P). Primal Fear, Fight Club, The Illusionist, Birdman: characters where identity, representation, and truth rarely coincide entirely.
Hawk appears to belong to the same family. Until we discover that Hawk was Howard.
Behind that sexually liberated man, almost irritatingly comfortable with himself, there was another man, destroyed by the death of his wife and forced to rebuild himself after her.
Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful uses of Norton's cinematic persona: for decades we've seen his characters hide other men, here we find a man who needed to invent another one in order to continue living.
And suddenly, what seemed like a pose becomes the past.
The dialogues are excellent precisely for that reason. They attack, defend, seduce, make you laugh, and, every now and then, a phrase goes too far and forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the person who uttered it. The intensity grows almost without leaving that apartment.
For much of the film, Hawk and Piña seem to represent everything that Joe and Angela have lost: freedom, desire, spontaneity. And, despite the inevitably pleasurable sex that a character played by Penélope Cruz is supposed to help provide, when the film ended I realized something curious: it wasn't in that sexually captivating couple that I found love.
I saw desire, freedom, understanding. Perhaps love as well. But that's not what I felt.
I found love in Joe and Angela. A tired, resentful, wounded love. A love that knows each other so well that it knows exactly where to hurt them. A sick love. But still love.
When they finally admit that the marriage is over, Olivia Wilde could end there.
But there's one piano left over.
Joe, the musician who never became one, finally sits down in front of him and plays.
Angela approaches.
Sit down next to him.
And it plays too.
After an entire film built on dialogue, the two people who most needed to meet finally manage to do so when they stop talking.
I don't know if it's a reconciliation or a farewell.
All I know is that that piano gives them the opportunity to recover the other one.
And it is at this moment that Howard, even though absent, returns to the film.
Because Howard also loved a woman. But he lost her.
They were left with no last argument, no night to try again, or a piano in front of which they could both discover if they still remembered the same song.
Joe and Angela still have that possibility.
And I like to think that perhaps that was, consciously or unconsciously, Hawk's true purpose in that house: a man who couldn't win back the woman he loved ends up offering two other people the chance to recover before losing themselves forever.
He entered offering them other people. He left returning them to each other.
Perhaps this is, after all, the true invitation of The Invite.
Because some loves become unhealthy and others end. And there's a huge difference between the two.
PS. If this film surprises you with the richness of its dialogue, despite the few characters and a single setting, then the theater awaits your presence. 😉
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