Impossible love and passion

A love story needs an obstacle: two enemy families, a marriage already made, a difference of rank, a war, a sense of propriety. Literature fixed the standard cases, the lovers of Verona, the bored wife of a provincial doctor, an ambitious young tutor and the wife of his employer. Cinema works above all on restraint and on what is never said: two neighbours in Hong Kong who never touch, a weekly meeting in an English station buffet, a letter that arrives too late to change anything.

Classroom reading paths

L'amour contrarié (being reviewed)

works 14

• PoetryThe Romance of TristanTristan et IseutBéroul · 1170A nephew and his uncle's wife drink a potion by mistake and fall in love without having intended to.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryLayli and Majnunلیلی و مجنونNizami Ganjavi · 1188The Arab legend of Qays, the man mad with love, set in Persian verse in the twelfth century.Literature
• Poetryلیلی و مجنونJami · 1484not translated into EnglishThe legend of the man mad with love, taken up in the fifteenth century by a mystic poet of Herat, in which Leyli becomes a figure of divine beauty.Literature
• TheatreRomeo and JulietWilliam Shakespeare · 1595Two children from two enemy houses bind themselves for life the day after they first see each other.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Red and the BlackLe Rouge et le NoirStendhal · 1830An ambitious carpenter's son seeks to rise in the society of the Restoration.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelMadame BovaryGustave Flaubert · 1857A provincial woman demands from life what her reading had promised her.LiteraturePublic domain
• NarrativeFirst LoveПервая любовьIvan Turgenev · 1860A narrative of 1860 about an adolescent in love with his neighbours' daughter, one summer in the country.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаLeo Tolstoy · 1878A novel in eight parts, published in a magazine in instalments, then in volume form in 1878: Anna's passion and, in counterpoint, a landowner's quest.LiteraturePublic domain
• CinemaChildren of ParadiseLes Enfants du paradisMarcel Carné · 1945In the Paris of the popular theatres, four men love the same woman, and the mime cannot say so.Cinema
• CinemaThe Way We LiveJill Craigie · 1946A city razed by bombs discusses what it will become, and its inhabitants join in.Cinema
• CinemaLetter from an Unknown WomanMax Ophüls · 1948Vienna at the turn of the century, in a letter that reveals to a seducer a love he never saw.Cinema
• CinemaAll That Heaven AllowsDouglas Sirk · 1955The story sets a widow's love against the conventions of her milieu and those of her own children.Cinema
• CinemaAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаAlexander Zarkhi · 1967A colour adaptation, in 1967, of Tolstoy's novel, with Tatiana Samoilova in the role of Anna.Cinema
• CinemaIn the Mood for Love花樣年華Wong Kar-wai · 2000Two neighbours deceived by their spouses, who vow not to be like them.Cinema