‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ and My Immigrant Life
When a movie changes your life.
I caught Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply late at night on PBS. I was channel surfing and landed on Chicago’s local PBS channel, WTTW. I was about 13 years old. I caught the film about 15 minutes in, to a close up of Juliet Stevenson’s face — it was an extreme closeup, the screen was dominated by her face, her nose, really, leaking. She’s crying, her hands lightly smudging her mascara, I was struck at how unflattering the scene was. It drew me in, and I settled in to see what this film was about.
It turned out to be a small, lovely little film about a woman who is trying to figure out how to live with her grief. Nina (Stevenson) is a London translator who is working to move on past the death of her partner, cellist Jamie (Alan Rickman). Her period of mourning is so profound that she starts to see him, hear him around her flat. It reminded me of Jerry Zucker’s Ghost, another movie about a woman whose lover comes back from the dead.
The story drew me in because it was engaging and funny and sad. But the film did something else to me. I was always something of an Anglophile. PBS was the source of that because of its roster of British costume dramas and sitcoms. I was always intrigued by London’s seemingly easy blend of old new. Georgian architecture clad with gigantic neon signs. Tweed-donning matrons walking the streets alongside punks with multicoloured Mohawks. Pubs that have been around for a century competing for customers with McDonald’s. So, seeing that Truly, Madly, Deeply was set in London, my interest was piqued and I watched.
What Truly, Madly, Deeply showed me was a London that I’ve rarely seen: a culturally diverse London, that was defined just as much by diaspora as it was by its history. I was growing up in Brighton Park Chicago, a Polish enclave. It was such a local existence, I didn’t really know much about the world outside of it. Intellectually, I knew Polish people lived in other cities, but seeing the Polish character, Titus (Christopher Rozycki), made me feel a deeper connection to the film and a deeper interest in the city. I was part of the Polish diaspora, like Titus, but my family settled in Chicago, specifically the blue-collar Southwest side. It was the kind of neighbourhood that people didn’t leave. Embarking on a trip Downtown was considered a big journey.
So seeing a Polish man build a life in London seemed brave and exciting to me; it was very different from the examples of Polish migration that I saw around me.
But as important as seeing Titus was, there was one scene that made the movie resonate with me. It took place in a park. Though filmed in Bristol, it’s meant to be London, probably Hampstead Heath. At the time, I didn’t realise that the scene wasn’t London, I just took it for granted that Nina and her friend, Maura (Stella Maris) were strolling through the park in the City.
As Barrington Pheloung’s mournful cello fills the screen, Nina and Maura are enjoying each other’s company, walking arm-in-arm as they idly practice their English lessons. Maura tries out new words, tentatively, but proudly, prompted by the supportive Nina, who gently coaxes and corrects. The scene is filmed beautifully, a very sunny day (the chilly autumnal crispness is palpable), and the park looks idyllic. It’s serene — a marked contrast from the preceding scene which showed Nina’s raw, naked anguish.
Maura is still working out the words and trips up on the word ‘clouds.’ “Nubes,” she asks in her native Spanish.
“Clouds,” Nina corrects, enunciating.
Her friend sounds the word, mimicking the round ow sound, getting the word right.
The two women lookup in the sky, squinting in the sun. Sighing with deep content, Nina says, “We can see the clouds in the sky.” The scene ends, punctuated by Pheloung’s score and a wide shot of the two women standing side-by-side, flanked by giant trees.
Though the film’s central plot is about Nina and her relationship with Jamie, the film engages with London’s ethnic and cultural diversity, especially when we see Nina at work. Maura represents both the promise and the difficulty of emigrating. In a later scene, on another ramble, Maura shares her life back in Chile, in which she was a filmmaker, whilst in London, like many immigrants, she performs manual labour, a cleaner. In a café, the pregnant Maura and Nina are attended by a close friend, Roberto (Arturo Venegas), a waiter who was a doctor in his native Chile. The scene is disrupted by a commotion when a querulous café manager objects to Roberto’s impromptu consultation, the argument erupting with lots of cross-talk in Spanish and English, with the manager copping to paying exploitative payroll practices.
Minghella, whose father was an Italian immigrant in the UK, uses Truly, Madly, Deeply as a way to share his progressive point of view of immigration. The film is a gentle paean to London’s multiculturalism and he draws sympathetic vignettes that illustrate how immigrants are handling their complex relationship with their adopted country. When we see characters like Maura, Roberto, and Titus, we are watching how they’re struggling to adapt to their new life whilst simultaneously carrying their former lives with them.
As much as the story is about Nina’s inability to move on from Jamie’s death, it’s also about the inability to successfully abandon one’s past life, even if the new life is taking place thousands of miles away. As much as places like London (or New York, Chicago, L.A.) are imagined as places of opportunity, immigration is also marked by angst.
When a drunken Titus is opening up to Nina, maudlin, he gives voice to the sense of loss, of homesickness of emigration:
I’m missing Poland…. Sometimes I think I hate Poland, but then a song goes through my head, some music. Or a taste. I remember the taste of Polish bread. Man should never drink. He remembers only his country, his mother, his lovers.
The last we see of Maura and Titus, it’s in a hospital, Maura is going into labour. Though Titus had professed his love to Nina repeatedly throughout the film, he eventually ends up with Maura. The scene feels very much Minghella tying up loose threads: Maura and Titus are immigrants in a country that can be somewhat hostile to people like them, and they find succour in each other’s company; with the baby born, we get to see a new generation — Maura’s child will be raised in London as one of its many second-generation immigrants, forever and continuously changing the city’s identity by folding his mother’s culture and his own culture (not to mention the influence of Titus, if the relationship lasts).
For Nina, the baby symbolises new life and the continuous march of living — it’s an important catalyst for her to begin the painful process of distancing herself from Jamie, whose otherworldly presence has only isolated her from her world; but when looking at the baby in the context of Minghella’s empathetic view of migrants, it’s a joyful reminder that continual multiculturalism of London is a forever.
Nina’s friendships with these characters were what stayed with me after watching the film (it’s why I return to it again and again). Though Titus, Maura, and Roberto experienced xenophobia, loneliness, and alienation in London, they also had Nina — she acted as an avatar to what is good about London. Nina speaks several languages and works in an office dedicated to internationalism. Her office is dedicated to the growing number of people who call London their home, but do not come to it speaking English as their first language. She represents a global London, one that is welcoming, friendly, and compassionate.
Truly, Madly, Deeply was released in 1990, some 17 years after the UK joined the European Communities, and 26 years before it voted to leave the European Union. Though not the only reason for Brexit, xenophobia, and suspicion of “the other” played a role in the campaign for Brexit. So, it’s an interesting experience to watch Truly, Madly, Deeply in the context of a post-Brexit UK, especially for someone like me who is an EU national. The rise of Euroscepticism and accompanying xenophobia, particularly with the gradual ascent of UKIP wouldn’t happen for another few years, so Minghella’s film works as a bit of a time capsule of a gentle moment when internationalism was still very much a thing in the UK.
But going back to the scene I discussed earlier in the essay. The one in the park. After watching the film for the first time, I remembered vowing that one day I would grow up, move to London, and walk through the park, on a cold, sunny day with a friend, arm-in-arm. I made this vow at 13, and 23 years later I was able to keep that vow. I was walking with a friend, arm-in-arm on a frigid, but beautiful, November day in Hyde Park. For over two decades, through repeated viewings, I nursed my dream of moving to London — a dream spurred on and inspired by the film — and made that dream a reality. And like Titus, Maura, and Roberto, I carry my experiences of my past life with me here today.
