Noticing a fair amount of thematic overlap amongst the films selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, Filmbrain has created a visual aid, awarding 15 of the Festival’s official selections unhappy faces for their representations of things like divorce, adultery, and daddy issues. The exercise reveals that, amongst the 30-something films on this year’s schedule, not only was there a marked lack of “traditional” romance on display, but the Festival as a whole trafficked in “an almost universally negative (and even cynical) view towards marriage, and a preponderance of infidelity.”

Which causes Filmbrain to wonder:

Is cinematic love, like, so last century? Has that infernal machine on the left coast that continues to pump out one cloying RomCom after another sullied the waters forever? Or are these films a genuine reflection of a post-whatever malaise that has succeeded in driving us apart from one another?

To Filmbrain’s disclaimer that he missed Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Celadon, which “sounds like it could have been a genuine love story”––yes, I guess it is. It just comes at through the Shakespeare back door of communication breakdowns ameliorated via cross-dressing.