Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

A trip, an excursion, an itinerant vocation, dazzling and wooing, inspiring and enticing, at the actor's discretion, exuberantly, around the globe, a marriage a liaison a fling, an assignation, redefined convergence impertinently penetrating curious hearts and minds with interpretive variability and starstruck quivers, paramount mercurial mischief seductively invested and tantalizingly outfitted, a song bird, a siren, fervid fledgling sweetly swooning, hesitantly marooning, eternal embraces jockeying for illumination lightly treading chaotic chasms with resplendent divination, resting, nesting, flocking, guilty pleasures routinely exonerated, a cue, applause.

Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) finds herself in England in Paul McGuigan's Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, dating an aspiring local actor (Jamie Bell as Peter Turner) while reimagining herself on the British stage.

She's sick however, no one knows that but her, and her secret confuses young Pete as he tries to romantically conjure.

The film compassionately reveals an agile professional resiliently refining her art, continuously seeking new challenges to sustain hardboiled momentum, brilliantly unaccustomed to the demands of routine structures, suddenly forced, to withdraw bedridden.

Flashbacks.

There's a wonderful scene where her and Mr. Turner authenticate on a beach beneath a cavalier sky, discussing life and love and fortune, as fish begin to frolic in the nearby sea.

Another which captures her radiantly celebrating a performance.

She seems like she must have been fun to hang out with until you got too close or demanded too much attention.

Peter must have meant something, but his expectations clashed with her carefully hidden secrets, which were concealed to promote her career, to ensure she would never have to stop working.

She knew that, not him, she knew what she had to do to maintain her image, her mystique, her fame, Pete does eventually acknowledge this, even if it unintentionally tears him up deep down.

I read an article the other day/month/year which stated that love was like an addiction and people require medical aid after breakups.

This article.

Not the most romantic way to examine loves lost.

Proust's Fugitive may function as a literary counterbalance.

Which proves the scientific point.

Without sterilizing the poetic dysfunction.

Good film.