Tainted Love: Inappropriate Relationships in Film

Romantic love can be a highly uncomfortable concept. Two (or three and even more) people suddenly see their private worlds intertwining and their emotions spiraling out of control. I might be exaggerating, of course; real life rarely, if ever, resembles the movies. However, in these films below where people who should not be in love suddenly find themselves in each other’s arm, their tainted love might really exhibit that irresistible pull that seems to wash away all the apparent ickiness. Fasten your seatbelt, readers, because you are in for a taboo-filled ride.

The Graduate

Having a crush on someone is always tough. Crushing on the daughter of the person you hook up with is plainly apocalyptic. In The Graduate (1967), recent college graduate Ben Braddock is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the sexually manipulative wife of his dad’s best friend, only to fall in love with her wholesome daughter. The film plays out the awkward intermingling of these relationships in a funny and simultaneously tragic way, as the audience is pulled into Ben’s masculinity crisis.

The Dreamers

The Dreamers (2003) is every cinephile’s wet dream. Reminiscent of French New Wave classics’s triangle love stories, the film also focuses on three young cineastes who are on the verge of both intellectual and sexual awakening. Two of them, however, happen to be brother and sister. Eroticizing cinephilia to the point of self-indulgence, The Dreamers uses the blindly passionate copulation between this band of outsiders as a metaphor for the social unawareness among the students of 1960s France.

Damage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEHz2gN8ESg

Damage (1992) takes the cliche concept of “love at first sight” to a completely different level. Dr. Stephen Fleming, a successful member of the Parliament, loses all his sensibility when he first set eyes on his son’s fiancee, Anna Barton. In the same vein, their sexual encounters are passionate, but wordless. Throughout the course of this fascinating examination of human attraction, the audience forever speculate whether there is substance beneath the facade of physical allurement.

The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher (2001) portrays an inverted look on the gendered power play within a teacher student relationship. Here it is Walter, a young male student who relentless pursues Erika, his seemingly prudent piano teacher. Although Erika appears to have the upper hand in the relationship, she is in fact deeply repressed and haunted by masochistic desires. Ultimately, as intoxicating as this cliche of forbidden love sounds, while the characters try desperately to inch closer to each other, they are instead pulled into their own black holes of unfulfilled lust.

The Night Porter

“Inappropriate” is not enough to describe the outrage surrounding The Night Porter (1974) Centering on the sadomasochistic relationship between Max, a former Nazi officer, and Lucia, a Holocaust survivor, the film has been called been dubbed a Naziploitation work. Despite the many grotesque sequences, there is a also real poetic quality in the characters’ sexual role play. Max speaks of a ghost of the past when he first sees Lucia again, pinpointing perfectly on the sometimes toxic nature of love; maybe, there really is no escape.

Honorable mentions:

Charlotte Rampling’s character cuddles up with Max, a chimpanzee in Max, Mon Amour (1968). In Birth (2004), Nicole Kidman’s character is drawn to a 10-year-old boy who she believes to be the reincarnation of her deceased husband. And basically all film versions of Hamlet because it does not get more awkward than seeing your uncle getting married to your widowed mother.