Love Etc.

Movie Review

Love and its predicaments: Reality served with a touching honesty

July 29, 2011|By Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

****

LOVE ETC. Directed by: Jill Andresevic

At: Kendall Square

Running time: 95 minutes

Unrated (some language)

The et cetera in “Love Etc.’’ sounds frivolous. Then you watch vital, 79-year-old Albert Mazur stir a can of Campbell’s soup for Marion, his older, only slightly less vital wife of a half-century, and your eyes well up with tears as much as the makers of, say, “The Notebook’’ would like them to. What we’re watching isn’t conventionally romantic. Albert cuts up some bread first while Marion sits, almost catatonic, at the kitchen table of their apartment. But by this point in Jill Andresevic’s documentary we know how much these two mean to each other, and this old man feeding this old woman is as stirring as John Wayne grabbing Maureen O’Hara in that doorway in “The Quiet Man.’’ Only, it’s real as well as vivid. It’s not simply that he loves her. It’s that love, in that moment, means doing something as mundane as stirring that stupid can of soup. It’s the et cetera, and the et cetera is everything.

It’s possible, I suppose, to overstate what Andresevic has accomplished. You might get to this movie, notice that she’s compartmentalized it into five stages - getting married, starting over, starting a family, first love, lasting love - and find it too tidy. You might watch the acclaimed theater director Scott Elliott fret about being gay and single and in his 50s, while having a surrogate named Lisa bear him a child and assume you could see this on TLC or OWN. You could see something like this on television. But even after many hours and many years of a reality show, you couldn’t get this real this naturally or this gently, and not in 95 minutes. When Chitra sits on her sofa in Queens and testily asks Mahendra whether he married her too soon, his answer is flooring. I’ve probably seen two people have more upsetting conversations on television, but I left “Love Etc.’’ believing that Andresevic came by hers honestly.

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