Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Phoenix both play adults who allow older men to pay their rent. For Paltrow, it’s a stock slimeball married guy who keeps her Michelle, an aging if well-bred bad girl, stashed in an apartment in The Old Neighborhood –– part easy alibi (his mama lives nearby), part obvious fetishistic class regression/emotional slumming (his mama lives near by). In Phoenix’s case, the older man is his father, an Israeli-born dry cleaner who wants to ensure his own comfortable retirement by making sure his wannabe photographer son Leonard hooks up with Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business partner. Too bad Leonard is constantly running off to answer text messages from Michelle, whose bought-and-paid-for pad is visible from his childhood window. He can gaze lovingly, creepily at his shiksa goddess’ blonde head floating behind a barred window across a courtyard while his too-close mom (Isabella Rossellini) spies on her son from just outside his bedroom door.

Leonard begins relationships with both women simultaneously, and much of the film is devoted to the ways in which he immerses himself in the pleasures offered by one to ameliorate the disappointments of the other. The dry cleaner’s daughter says she wants to “take care” of Phoenix, but she probably shouldn’t––at worst unstable and immature and at best just something of a bore, he’s a 30 year-old boy who has moved back in with the ‘rents after a failed engagement and multiple suicide attempts. In turn, Paltrow (more impressive than she has been in years cast against type as a cannily manipulative roiling ball of need) exploits Leonard’s proximity (emotional, physical) as a salve for the constant pain wrought by her married boyfriend’s distance and seeming indifference.

A film about emotional extremes, Two Lovers plays out in visual extremes. Grey very consciously color codes his spaces to correspond to his narrative’s alternating moods. All grey and green and drained of light during the narrative’s darkest points, Two Lovers shifts into chromatic overdrive when its bi-polar protagonist is closest to manic oblivion. A crucial clutch scene that might under other circumstances seem like a romantic high is marked as anything but by Grey’s choice of palette: there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. Since this scene comes after a pair of less-ambiguous low moments (a suicide attempt, a miscarriage), all rendered in the same lightless matte, we know to read what the characters see as a moment of unexpected ecstasy, as in all actuality a third flirtation with death. It’s horribly bleak. It’s also beautiful.

The film’s tone can be somewhat contradictory, and it’s hard to say whether Grey is saying that his obviously troubled protagonist’s ability to seduce two gorgeous women (and, most problematically, that he stuns both ladies into a state of something like love via swift administration of his dick) makes for comedy or tragedy. Maybe both: Phoenix himself, starting at the moment of seduction and carrying through to the end of each such scene, seems like he’s playing a completely different person. It’s a dramatization of the transformative nature of sexual attraction.

In the film’s second to last shot, Phoenix locks a single, tortured eye on the camera from behind the embrace of the woman who he’s just, by default, given a diamond ring. It’s a single shot that undercuts any possibility that this apparent traditional romantic happy ending is in fact what it seems. It would be difficult to look at that image and still believe that anyone in this movie has actually been in “real” love since they stepped on screen, to not feel a cynical, momentary jolt that romantic love itself is never really more than a collision of circumstance and impulse, a way of taking care of a need via the most readily available means. It’s a testament to the childish madness of infatuation, and maybe even true love’s impossibility. Happy Valentines!

This review is a rethink of some thoughts I posted after seeing Two Lovers for the first time at Cannes;  a second viewing this week outside of the pressure and exhaustion of the film festival cleared up some of my questions about the film. Sometimes that happens!