Why do period romances have special appeal? There’s always a part of the present self that’s dissatisfied with or stressed by its current circumstances. Sometimes, this can make the self look to the future, and plan and chart a course for things to get better. Other times, it looks to nostalgia. What if it was curative to immerse ourselves for a couple of hours in the picturesque magic (or sadness) of past times, simpler and vastly different to our own, and of past people, with their vastly different struggles and emotions compared to those of our everyday life?
Maybe these movies can satisfy our yearning for the past and for what’s different—a feeling that keeps revisiting us every now and then. Maybe they can reinvigorate us and fill us with feeling that we can then take into our technology-filled and often cold-seeming present, to live it more aligned with our emotions. Romances, of course, are by nature full of feeling. It’s not always happiness. Indeed, most of the entries on this list aren’t exactly happy stories. But if, at times, we’re stressed in the present, any immersive emotions can be a welcome antidote and can be cathartic. As a result, here are period romance movies that we can’t live without.
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9 The English Patient
Miramax
In The English Patient, a bedridden patient slowly opens up to the nurse who cares for him about a past he had chosen to forget and a promise he had made to his lover back in the 1930s. Although a little overlong and slow, the film contains passages of such beauty that they largely justify the entire movie. “We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we’ve entered and swum up like rivers, fears we’ve hidden in,” says Kristin Scott Thomas’s character. “We are the real countries. Not boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.” This is indeed the kind of onscreen poetry we can’t live without.
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8 Brokeback Mountain
Famously losing the Best Picture Oscar to Crash, while being more widely recognized as the better film, Brokeback Mountain features exceptional acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as a gregarious and an uncommunicative cowboy, respectively. They find the opportunity to suddenly act on buried queer desires when they have long hours and weeks to spend in each other’s company, herding sheep on the mountain. What follows is a meditation, spanning years, on the hurt they each deal with in their own way, which results from the need for secrecy about their continuing on-off romance. The scene in which Ennis asks Jack if he’s been to Mexico, and the ensuing eruption of words and emotions, has to be one of the best in modern cinema.
7 Far from the Madding Crowd (2015)
One of the best of the British countryside period romances, Far From the Madding Crowd features a young woman (Carey Mulligan) with a free-spirited, strong character who, throughout the film, is figuring out what she truly wants. Three men fall for her almost as soon as they first set eyes on her. One is her equal in ego and charm, but is all power games. One is so taken over by her that he’s too self-effacing, and his feelings consume him. The third is somebody she can always rely on for help, good but not weak. However, far from imposing himself, he doesn’t try to seduce, and pained by her early rejection of a cut-and-dry proposal, he won’t ask again. That’s how the board is set, but the beauty of the film is that, as the dance between these characters plays out, they each develop.
6 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Warner Bros.
David Fincher described it as “a grand romance about death.” The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a story of a man born in an old person’s body that grows younger with time. His relationship with his childhood friend then love, is a story about how we’re all so different, yet so alike, with the one constant being the passage of time. Nothing lasts, but we “meet in the middle,” as Cate Blanchett’s Daisy tells Brad Pitt’s Benjamin. Alexandre Desplat’s score is one of this century’s best.
5 Carol
Film4
Carol is another story of forbidden romance, set in New York in the early 1950s. The score by Carter Burwell plays a major role in this one, as it swells to describe the inner voice of its two protagonists, played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, while most of the time, the images can only show looks and glances between them. This lush period film was named one of the greatest films of the 21st Century by the BBC, despite having missed out on a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards.
4 The Princess of Montpensier
Paradis Films
A movie that deserves to be seen by a wider audience, The Princess of Montpensier deals with the classical French literature theme of passion versus virtue. It’s set in 16th century France against the backdrop of the Wars of Religion. The princess discovers passionate love at a young age, but it’s soon taken away from her for a premature wedding. She’s too much of a proud soul, too attached to her youthful ideals to submit to a lesser option, even if it’s not as bad as it could have been, as her husband genuinely loves her. She’s deceived in more than one way as she tries to find her way. The film ends on an unforgettable letter from the one person who truly understood her, the older and wiser Count of Chabannes.
3 Atonement
Universal Pictures
Joe Wright’s best work is an impossibly beautiful movie of two lovers separated by war and a young girl’s act of betrayal, born out of an active imagination, and partly unintentional, but for which she would never forgive herself. Although not especially deep as a story, aesthetically, Atonement is the stuff of dreams (look for the scenes of letters exchanged between the separated couple in voiceover). The music by Dario Marianelli is transportive, the cinematography, which includes a 5-minutes tracking shot on the Dunkirk beach, is highly accomplished, and James McAvoy makes his character very easy to feel for.
2 Shakespeare in Love
A seamless mix of quotable comedy, romantic drama, and melancholic depth, Shakespeare in Love is also about the power of words. It’s the imagined tale of how William Shakespeare wrote about the star-crossed lovers of Verona in Romeo and Juliet. What experiences could have provided enough inspiration to produce such a work? It all culminates in the scene of the play’s rendition, which is both hilariously self-aware and, at the same time, conveys the enthralling power of great theater. It’s followed by a bitter farewell, but one that refuses to submit to defeatism. Shakespeare will keep writing, and Viola, “whose soul is greater than the ocean,” will be his “heroine for all time.”
1 The New World
New Line Cinema
Terrence Malick’s characters are always looking for something essential that can fill their life with transcendence and meaning. The Native American princess of The New World calls it “Mother” and wonders if it’s found in the nature around her or in the new love she’s found for this captain from beyond the seas, John Smith. John also wonders if it’s to be found with the princess in these woods, or if it lies in the continued exploration of new shores, in attempting to give birth to a new society, free from the shackles of the old world he’s coming from. He eventually makes a major decision. It’s doubtful there’s ever been a more poetic moment of symbolism in movies than when the two characters meet years later and the princess asks, “Have you found your Indies, John?” and he replies, “I may have walked past them.”
