Every now and then I get an idea and just run with it.  This is an adaptation of an essay I put together which briefly explored several themes I thought intriguing. And what the hell…Liquorature is about the Arts as well as likkers and books, so why not?

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As Mulder and Scully, “The Third Man”, “Babylon 5,” “Lucas,” and so many others have showed us so many times, unrequited love is probably the most heart-rending of them all. Done badly, features or shows which do not honour the underlying depth of such feelings are sentimental tripe. Done well, and one watches something luminous unfold.

If I had to chose a movie that stayed with me for long past the day I saw it first, then it would have to be the South Korean piece “3-Iron”. I’m not entirely sure why they called it that, since the club in question is not the central motif, except perhaps in an obscure sense. Critic James Berardinelli suggests that the main male character’s undervalued and overlooked persona make the analogy to golf’s possibly least-used club somewhat inevitable, but I think that may be overanalyzing.

In essence, this gentle film shows what pacing, mood and atmosphere can do to elevate the humdrum into something more special, perhaps even artistic. The journey and travails of the young man and the battered wife have a sense of timelessness about them – it is no stretch to imagine this as a silent movie. To western eyes it is also a very strange story, since the way the youth goes into houses and stays there (in spite of the things he does while in residence) strike a sense of discord in a society more used to people vandalizing and tearing up a home they enter without permission.

Be that as it may, at the very end, the woman, seemingly reconciled with her husband, says “I love you,’ and the way it is said, how it said, make the emotion of that perfect moment nothing short of magical.

And to me, I immediately saw that scene mirrored in another film abut outsiders: “Dirty Pretty Things”, which is not so much about a young Turkish immigrant and a West African one in the streets of London, trying not to get deeper into the quagmire of an organ theft operation, as about survival at the bottom rung, in a hostile, skewed world, where viciousness and cruelty are the order of the day. There again, in a scene of uncommon sadness and power, the two main characters say goodbye at the airport, moments away from parting forever, and then, almost unheard, she admits her feelings before turning away.

Which brings me to the third, and to my mind, one of the strongest animated films ever made (number four in line behind “Princess Mononoke”, “The Incredibles” and “Grave of the Fireflies”), “The Iron Giant,” where Hogarth Hughes delights in the strange mechanical object he befriends in the woods of Maine, at the height of the Communist scare in 1957. While the film makes a strong case for not jumping to conclusions about others and holding back an instinctive urge to destroy what we do not understand, the core of it all is the relationship between the kid and his robot (whose origins are never really spelled out, though the DVD gives some hints of the civilization from which he came). And as in the other two films noted here, at the end, when the giant leaves (for reasons I will leave you to discover), there is a swell of emotion, of sadness, of poignancy, and when Hogarth says “I love you,” there isn’t a dry eye in the house.

I agree that “E.T”. was wonderful, that moment in “The Empire Strikes Back” was great, and that there have been dramas out there which have pulled the heartstrings and misted the eye. It’s something about the backdrop, the fullness of the characters and the story, which make these three films stand out. Forget seeing the latest blockbuster. For three unsung, quiet and overlooked films about the nature of unrequited love, look no further than these