Impossible Love

Metin Erksan’s monochrome film ‘Time to Love’ (1965), a curious mixture of old-fashioned Turkish melodrama and 1960s European art cinema, is generally considered to be the director’s most unusual and personal work. At its heart is a Romantic notion, one which proposes that pure love is an ideal that will inevitably be threatened or destroyed by the contradictions and complexities of real life. The central character, Halil, a house painter, regularly lets himself into the holiday home where he is working in order to sit in a chair smoking cigarettes and gazing at a large picture of the house’s absent owner, the beautiful Meral. One day Meral discovers Halil there, and complications arise when she becomes infatuated with him. Although the return of his admiration might be expected to fulfil his dreams, Halil gradually comes to the realisation that he actually loves the image, not its subject, because it regards him with unchanging warmth and tenderness. He believes, because of the distance between their financial means and social status, that an actual relationship would almost certainly end in failure. Halil at first spurns Meral’s attention out of fear and a desire to sustain his ideal, but their intense feelings continue to bring them together, with dramatic consequences.

This kind of Romanticism has a long history in Western culture. Much of John Keats’ poetry, for instance, reflects his concern with the passing of time and life’s transient, inconstant nature. In the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), he muses on connections between an ideal realm and mortal limitations; wondering about the two lovers in chase of one another, he asks himself whether their unchangeable but lifeless love is preferable to a living but uncertain intimacy. Keats envies the permanence of their desire but is aware that its fulfilment escapes them: ‘She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’ This is close to Halil’s quandary; they both long for enduring love, aware that it is usually lacking or absent in the world; as a consequence, they turn to reverie as a way of attaining their ideal. The self-imposed separation or displacement that is the focus of the film, the concept of love that remains unfulfilled, nourished by longing and distance, is a trope, however, that perhaps more often arises in traditional stories from the East than those of the West. Two such tales were written by the Persian poet Nizami, one about the Sassanian king Khosrow and Shirin, who falls in love with his image in a painting, the other an account of the impossible bond between Layla and the poet Majnun, in which Majnun’s longing for his lover is both his wound and his healing. In these stories there are often parallels, stated or implied, between idealised human and divine devotion, and Majnun’s passion is sometimes interpreted from a Sufi perspective.

Eric Clapton’s most memorable album, ‘Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs’, was recorded in 1970 under the pseudonym of ‘Derek and the Dominos’. On its cover was a painting by Emile Frandsen called ‘La Jeune Fille au Bouquet’, which the guitarist first came across when he and his band were staying at the artist’s farmhouse in the south of France. When Clapton compared the portrait to his own idealised love, Pattie Boyd, whom he liked to think of as Layla, Frandsen offered him the painting, which has since become closely identified with both the album and its key song. Clapton’s insistence that the image should be used without a name or album title imposed on it, a decision that emphasised the idealisation of his muse, did little to help the record’s sales; it was only when the title track was released as a single two years later that the album, now considered a rock classic, began to receive widespread acclaim and attention.

The story of the dramatic relationships between Eric Clapton, Pattie Boyd, and George Harrison (to whom Boyd was married when Clapton fell in love with her) is so familiar that it needs no retelling, but it is heartening to recall that they remained good friends. In that light, after Harrison and Boyd’s divorce was finalised in 1977, Clapton mischievously gave the ‘Layla’ painting to Harrison as a ‘replacement’ for the real Pattie Boyd, and when he and Boyd also divorced in 1989, Harrison gave it back, this time to his ex-wife. Some months ago, Pattie Boyd held a successful sale of her memorabilia at Christie’s, including love letters from Clapton (in one of which he addresses her as ‘L’, an abbreviation of ‘Layla’) as well as the painting itself. A pre-sale estimate of £40,000 to £60,000 seemed ample for the picture, but it sold for an astonishing sum, close to £2,000,000. Someone clearly felt that the painting, a ‘portrait’ that has become iconic through its absorption of idealised projections and associations, was worth a small fortune.

For further exploration:

The film’s trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bycSjWBi7CI

On ‘Time to Love’: https://www.themonochromepictureshow.com/reviews/love-is-an-ideal

and: https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/isles-of-passion

The Pattie Boyd sale of the ‘Layla’ painting at Christie’s: https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/pattie-boyd-collection/eric-clapton-derek-dominos-34/211875?ldp_breadcrumb=back

Hedge chairs and ‘Autoprogettazione’

Rooftoppers, Night Climbers, and May Day at Magdalen