I thought one of the stories in "Love Actually" could have used a lil' Poly, but I can't be troubled to look into who the actors are. The guy who gets married, the girl, and his friend...the photographer. Them.
You're talking about Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who marries Juliet (Keira Knightley) while Mark (Andrew Lincoln) is best man.
Love Actually - the first feature film directed [
as well as scripted] by the screenwriter of
4 Weddings And A Funeral and
Notting Hill - was pretty much savaged by the critics. Call me a soppy old romantic, but I thought - despite some sequences which are embarrassingly awful - it MUCH better than either of those 2.
I can't understand your statement:
I thought one of the stories in "Love Actually" could have used a lil' Poly
at all! This story is
dripping in polyamory!
(For those of who who haven't seen the film: it's made up of shuffled-together stories, so that it jumps from story A to story B to story C... comes back at some point to story A, then story D, then... comes back at some point to story A again, etc. with all stories having an epilogue at the same time at Heathrow Airport [London]. Bit players in story B turn up as major characters in their own story, F, vice versa, and so on.)
But somebody has taken the trouble to unshuffle the pack and pick out the bits of the story that
Nexus refers to, which has been uploaded
here. [Don't click on that YET!] Only they left out the epilogue which is included - along with everybody else' epilogue -
here. [Don't click on that one either, yet!]
Nexus: Pay attention (in the first clip) to the points at 07:32 [when Juliet first starts to suspect], at 07:53 [when it's pretty obvious], and from 12:27 to the end of that clip [when she runs out of the house, kisses Mark for his open declaration and he ends up saying (to HIMSELF!): "Enough... enough now..."]
The fact that Mark says this proves that he isn't willing to cheat on his best friend. The fact that Juliet kisses him (like
that) proves that she is attracted... (and not just sexually).
And then the epilogue ("1 month later"). Pay attention (in the 2nd clip) to the scene that starts at 0:42. Peter, Juliet, AND Mark show up together to meet Jamie and Aurelia off the 'plane. And they all seem happy... or at least relatively so. Mark mumbles: "Thought I'd tag along." And Juliet is ecstatic.
Open to interpretation:
a) Mark and Juliet have both admitted to an attraction / love for each other, but in order not to wound Peter, they've decided to put it behind them and be "just good friends". At least Mark's agonising of earlier has come to an end.
b) Mark and Juliet are having an affair, about which Peter knows nothing. I don't buy this, frankly. It's discounted as far as I'm concerned.
c) It's all open (polyamory) between the 3 of them, but they haven't come out of the closet as far as other friends are concerned.
I actually like the fact that it isn't spelled out for us. This may be pure marketing: if the ending had been rub-your-nose-in-it polyamory, they might have scared some of the die-hard romcom fans off. But there's certainly a hint that this is a possibility.
... And I can choose to believe the ending I prefer.
OK, you can go back and click on those links now.
p.s. The
real ending to the film (included in that 2nd clip, after the camera has left off pointing towards the stars and shows unknowns hugging and kissing each other in the airport - to the sound of The Beach Boys singing "God Only Knows") is possibly my favourite closing sequence of any film.
p.p.s. Certainly
not polyamory, but (in part because twice in my life I've started to learn a foreign language because of Love and I can empathise with declaring love in a foreign language for the first time),
this is my favourite scene in the film (and it leads straight into the 2nd clip, linked above).
