Blue Valentine is a 2010 American romantic drama film written and directed by Derek Cianfrance. Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, and Joey Curtis wrote the film, and the band Grizzly Bear scored it. The film is presented in a nonlinear narrative, jumping between the beginning of Dean and Cindy’s man valentine box and their marriage several years later. The following is a linear summary of the plot.
Dean is a hopeless-romantic high-school dropout, working for a moving company in Brooklyn. Cindy is an aspiring doctor studying pre-med while living with her bickering parents and caring for her grandmother in Pennsylvania. Five years later, the couple lives in rural Pennsylvania with their daughter, Frankie, and family dog, Megan. Cindy is now a nurse at a clinic where her boss, Dr. Feinberg, had just offered her to join him at his new clinic in the near future. Meanwhile, Dean, unambitious and struggling with alcohol, paints houses for a living.
After having gone missing due to Cindy leaving a gate unlocked, Megan is found dead by the roadside which further strains the couple’s marriage. At the motel, Dean repeatedly tries to seduce Cindy but she rebuffs him. Frustrated with Dean’s lack of ambition, she questions him during dinner which leads to another argument. The two make up and get drunk but Cindy is displeased when Dean asks if she wants to have another child with him. They start fighting again and she locks him outside the bedroom. Back at the motel, an annoyed Dean finds the note and shows up drunk at the clinic where he has another heated argument with Cindy.
Feinberg when he tries to intervene who then fires Cindy and kicks them both out. While leaving, Cindy demands a divorce making Dean throw away his wedding ring but they both attempt to look for it later. The director was also unable to film the “young” and “older” scenes several years apart as he had hoped, again due to lack of money. I drew a circle, an hour diameter around her house, and it just touched Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The film was shot in Super 16mm and Red One. The former was used for the pre-marriage scenes and the latter was used for the post-marriage scenes. While on The Hollywood Reporter Director’s Roundtable, Cianfrance said that he had given up his entire director’s fee to help fund the film: “I mean, it came down to we were exactly my fee short. They paid me and I just paid it back.
So I still have to pay taxes on it, you know. So I actually had to pay to make the movie. Gosling wrote and performed some songs by himself. The band Grizzly Bear composed the score of the film. A soundtrack for the film was released by Lakeshore Records.
The Quarters for the obscure Prix Label of Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s. The film premiered in competition at the 26th Sundance Film Festival. On October 8, 2010, Blue Valentine was given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA for American cinemas. This was due to a scene depicting cunnilingus.