3/28/05

So two of my favorite movies, You've Got Mail and Love Actually, both mention Joni Mitchell somewhat. Emma Thompson refers to her as the person who taught a cold-hearted English woman how to feel. Anyway, I knew the song Big Yellow Taxi, and it was enough to get me interested in her as a songwriter/lyricist. So Miriam bought me Clouds for Christmas, and the first song we listened to was Both Sides, Now, which Tom Hanks quotes, and which is featured pretty prominently in Love Actually. It is an incredible, incredible song. And yes, by me repeating incredible, that means it's really incredible.

So we were watching some of the special features on the Love Actually DVD, and the director was talking about this particular song. He was mentioning how when she wrote it, she must have been around 25 or so. Just so precocious to write about being able to see love and life from both sides at that age. Anyway, in 2000, she re-recorded the song (originally released in 1969), and it's so interesting, because her voice is so different, full of age, somehow wiser. This is the version they use in the movie. It's just so poignant - the scene is when Emma Thompson's character expects to get a piece of jewelry that she knows her husband has bought, but instead receives this Joni Mitchell album, "to continue her emotional education" as he says. Which means, the necklace was meant for someone else. She goes into their bedroom, to escape, and these are the lyrics that play behind her superb acting:

Moons and junes and ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As ev’ry fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
You leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all


I love the chorus - I've looked at love from both sides now. My favorite part is "and still somehow it's love's illusions I recall." So sad, so poignant, so true. I can't explain exactly why this line gets me so much. In it is contained all of the hope, the foolishness, the blindness that we have as humans.

I've watched that movie, Love Actually, 3 or 4 times now, and I think I've liked it better every time. I mean, in the end, it's pretty harmless (well, the actors standing in for that porn movie is pretty harmful, but otherwise). It's a British romantic comedy. But it just gets some things done very well. I love the title, actually, I think it's pretty brilliant. Anyway.