The four loves and pasta, of course
On Metrograph's Valentine's Day special and 4 pastas tied to the 4 types of love.
If you’re in nyc today, or this month, Metrograph has paired a quartet of films for with each of the four types of love—affection, friendship, romance, charity—contemplated in C.S. Lewis’s radio-talks-turned-book, first published in 1960. It’s a refreshing and intriguing (then again Dime Square, may not…?) foundation on which to program a Valentine’s Day series. Regardless of your religious inclinations, you may (correctly!) find the writer/scholar/theologian’s philosophical inquiry stimulating, poetically charged—even a little cheeky.
It energized me to whip up this last minute send, something a little different, and pair each of the different loves with a pasta, the de facto dish of romance, and where to get them. You can find that below.
For traditional rom-com and anti-romcom takes in the moviepudding vein, check out my previous posts from Valentine’s Days past.
SHORT TAKES
Playing at Metrograph today, and later month, and also streaming elsewhere.
A self-reflexive love story where boy meets girl, who met a boy, who once met a girl (and everyone’s lives acutely yet delicately touched because of it), Lou Ye’s SUZHOU RIVER is a glittering piece of modern filmmaking, moody and sly. With its gentle gangsters, doubles, a melancholic undertow and style, it bears the influence of Hong Kong new wave, Vertigo, and then some.
Better than Drive My Car is the other Ryusuke Hamaguchi that came out in 2021— WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, a shifting meditation on romantic desire that plays like Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo.
I’m surprised by how much my heart yielded to PTA’S LICORICE PIZZA, its smooth rhythms, lived-in texture, and yes the romance. The groovy SoCal mood is encapsulated in the theater restaurant’s themed cocktail—rye, Campari, vanilla, lemon, blood orange—a sunny soda-counter take on the Boulevardier.
CASABLANCA is a film which needs no introduction, which I’m now discovering remains unseen by a number of my friends. After burgers and wine at the newish Revelie, we headed to the Anjelika to correct this, only to realize we went to the wrong one… We did the sensible thing, returning to the chic yet persuasively timeworn luncheonette for more wine, fries, and talk. Sitting under a fringe lamp in the corner booth it felt the tiniest bit like Rick’s. My reassessment and their first evaluation of the classic will just have to wait.
I tried to guess which movie was paired with which love without reading the program notes and came up completely wrong. (I didn’t note them here on purpose, in case you want to take a stab at it). To be fair the boundaries between these love categories do bleed into one another, build on each other, and can ultimately co-exist. The wheels are already spinning in my brain to put together my own “four loves” slate for next year.
4 pastas / 4 loves by C.S. Lewis
Find the book here, the best dried pasta here, and specific dishes linked throughout.
Storge, empathy and affection
The homely taken-for-granted love, the one you keep to yourself and forget exists, until something goes wrong. The one you’d be hard pressed to admit or declare. A love initially born of convenience, bred of repetition, with someone who just “happen to be there.” It forms the basis of all other loves, or should anyway in an ideal world. A successful arranged marriage. A platonic odd couple pairing. Ozu.
a deep bowl of spaghetti, humble and foundational
“Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move [It is] responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.”
Philia, friendship
The least instructive and potentially least intuitive. Unfavorably billed as an unsatisfying substitute for other loves, as it lacks the primal urgency romance and the resolute devotion of family. Not vital to our existence, yet it it is the spice of it and all the more enriched because of it—and the more of it, the better too.
a crispy baked mac and cheese, equal parts creamy and crisped
”Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
Eros, romantic love
To go on thinking of her/him/them. To fall in love, to be in love. Like the above, it bears little explanation
bucatini carbonara or linguini with clams, silky and slinky
“The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory.”
Agape, charity
Unconditional, sacrificial love. A Paul Schrader man in the room type of love. Bruce Willis detonating the bomb. Jack and Rose perhaps. Or, simply, a donkey.
an endless tray of proper lasagna bolognese, long simmered, deeply layered, mothered over, and ricotta less — God-level
“In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”