What is Love?

People are nothing without love. They need it like food, water, and air. Love fills every cell of the human body so that the person feels comfortable and confident. Love can totally change the worldview; it is virtually the best feeling in the world. In general, people consider love as a condition of the strong shock, delight, rapture, or ecstasy, which changes a person physically and spiritually. Many feats were committed in the name of love, and many talented artists have been trying to explore its nature love. The movie Paris, je t`aime is one of the best representatives in the constellation of romantic movies. It is a wonderful film, consisting of a plurality of pieces of love. This light and bright piece of cinematography leaves behind the best feelings of peacefulness, harmony, and love. Paris, je t`aime deliberately conveys the mood of Paris, an atmosphere of love and romance, justifying the well-known clichés. Love is not a simple chemistry just between a man and a woman – it can touch the soul strings of every person on Earth. Love can touch different people with various fates because it may be loyal, blind, maternal, paternal, alternative, jealous, sudden, resurrecting, and extraordinary.

In this movie, each story is extremely meaningful since it reveals the most hidden human feelings and emotions. At first sight, these shorts are different – sad, funny, fantastic, or abstract, but all of them are united by one immense feeling – love. When watching this movie, the person acknowledges that love is the mystery and interprets this word personally. According to Fromm (1956), “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, and it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever” (Fromm, 56).

There exist many substitutes that people mistakenly consider as love: lust, passion, empathy, compassion, but love is, first of all, devotion. A loving person will always invest everything (material and spiritual aspects) in the relationship asking nothing in return. Paris, je t`aime is a kaleidoscope of the fleeting five-minute sketches, shorts, small life stories about love – sad, funny, and lyrical. These seemingly unrelated at first sight stories begin to gather soon into the one single unit because they all have one soul and one reason – love. “Love should be essentially an act of will, of a decision to confess my life completely to that of one other person” (Fromm, 1956, p. 56). The movie makes the audience think about what may be more surprising, deeper, more mysterious, beautiful, stunning, dizzying, and life-giving than love. Paris, je t`aime is a discouraging authors` imagination flight from realism to the phantasmagoria describing different kinds of love in a multifaceted city of Paris. Everybody knows that Paris is a cosmopolitan city that has become a melting pot of many races, religions, and cultures. Love lives here, making Paris a perfect place to express the feelings.

In conclusion, it should be said that Paris, je t`aime is a brilliant collection of eighteen stories that shock, touch, and make the audience admire and fall in love. Nothing can beat love by its force, its ability to subjugate people, and create a mess in their minds. It is love that is the cause of both the happiest and the saddest moments in human life. When people fall in love, they just become the puppets in the hands of the overpowering feeling. Love in any its kind – unrequited or mutual, peaceful or exciting – will always remain a mystery; the inexplicable feeling that certainly will surprise the person in the most unexpected moment. In the modern age, people are afraid to fall in love – they do not want to be disappointed, betrayed, and broken. However, love is worth all the efforts and failures; only love can cure the injured human soul.