"Stealing Hearts" was released in 2004, which is an old film from 17 years ago. In addition to the incredibly luxurious cast (Jude Lowe, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts and Cliff Owen as the four key characters), there are also the acting skills of Natalie Portman and Cliff Owen, who have been shortlisted and swept major awards, and what really grabs the audience's heart and brain is the so-called love of people living in the city that screenwriter Patrick Marpel tries to present and discuss.
We watch those loves breed and then watch them crash, and we watch desire add rifts to a relationship, and between deep but shallow love desires, we seem to see the truth of love as urban people.
Patrick Mabo's four characters have distinct personalities and backgrounds: Dan (Jude Law), a novelist with a conservative personality and a career in writing obituary; Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper who has just arrived in London from the United States, is young and romantic; Anna (Julia Roberts), a photographer facing divorce, is intellectually and melancholy; and dermatologist Larry (Cliff Owen), who is good at observation and lust, revolves around the entangled and cyclical love feuds between these four men and women.
In fact, the film can also be stated very succinctly: "Dan and Alice fall in love, then Dan falls in love with Anna, Anna and Larry still cheat with Dan after marriage, Dan and Anna after breaking up with each other, and Alice falls in love with Larry, and finally Anna returns to Larry, Dan also returns to Alice, and the plot ends with Alice leaving Dan."
The two couples betray each other, leave and repair the old passages form a complex and difficult plot line, from which it is not difficult to glimpse the so-called bad habits of urban people that Patrick Mabo tried to accuse.
The love of the characters in the play seems to be sincere, but in fact it falls into the net built by the two of them, such as vain words and endless desires, and it is because Dan and Alice, Anna and Larry are close to each other at first.
Alice is wandering and longing for a home, Anna is lonely and demanding to rely on, two empty women meet two other men with empty desires, Dan is deeply attracted to the weak and helpless Alice, and Larry is always following the drive of physical desire and falling in love with Anna's beauty.
They rely on the presence of their partners to fill a missing piece of each other's hearts, but such a relationship is also overwhelmed, and the love born to satisfy the desire will eventually die from other longings, and the impatient urbanite seems to be trapped in the pursuit of new desires again and again.
So Dan gets bored taking care of Alice a year later, and easily falls in love with the independent and arrogant Anna; Larry can't resist the temptation to spend the night with the warbler during the business trip, and his wife Anna does not blame her, because she is also unfaithful to her husband because she is secretly meeting Dan.
It seems that from the beginning, the beginning of a relationship in the story is not to truly love each other, but in the vast city, eager to contact with a layer of warm skin, eager to be dependent on a heart, physically and psychologically want to be closer to each other, but also can not withstand too many temptations outside the glass window. So he weakly agreed to compromise, allowing the unconcealed desire to ruin a relationship between the two.
Patrik Mabo dissects the bad habits of modern people talking about love, because we always ask the other half to be honest and loyal, but often we don't think about the consequences of telling the truth.
The men in the play always ask each other about the details of having fun with other men, but they have never thought about whether they want to know the truth.
Ironically, in addition to the mutual distrust between the characters, whenever they tell the truth, but always lead to a bad ending, Alice finally because she can't bear the weight of telling the truth, and decides to leave Dan with an iron heart.
On the one hand, Patrick Mabo exposes the abounds of trustless relationships in the real world, and on the other hand, it also leads us to think that perhaps the current world often cannot tolerate a relationship without lies.
At the same time, Patrick Mabo constantly emphasizes the concept of "stranger" in the play: Dan writes the obituary of strangers, Alice undresses strange men, Anna's photography takes strangers as the theme, and Larry judges the disease from the outermost epidermis of strangers.
They are all four random strangers in the city, who meet each other because of some chance encounters, and their luck is good and they develop a relationship.
An object is not unique to them, but it appears at the right time: Alice happens to be standing across the road when Alice is in a car accident, Anna happens to be in the aquarium to meet Larry, and if it is slightly changed, the storyline may be completely different.
And not all of us who live in the city, the so-called doom in the midst of thousands of strangers, may actually be the result of good luck and timing, as Patrick Marber said: "The matter of who we fall in love with is random, uncertain, not predestined."
The love that has developed in this way is not true love, what is important is that any relationship should exclude sweet words and desires as the basis, and treat each other sincerely and manage to achieve a long-term relationship.
In addition to the difference between the reverse ending of the film and the original script (for those who have not seen the movie yet), the biggest difference is that the movie is interpreted through real people and is a bright big star, with Jude Lowe's face and Julia Roberts's fame as a filter, and the villainous characters in the script are all charming and likable.
In fact, these four characters are not perfect, and they are all ordinary people with considerable flaws, no different from us, and there are always some fatal bad habits when talking about love.
Maybe you, like Alice, are eager to be loved and insecure, or like Dan, who never knows what your heart wants, maybe like Anna, who doesn't allow herself to be happy and melancholy, or like Larry, always succumbs to the desires that are stirring in your heart. We walked around the city with our bad habits, some passing by you, and some touching you like that.
"Stealing Hearts" is a metropolis comedy that dissects the love and emotional relationships between men and women in the metropolis. And in the metropolis where everyone is indifferent, can we cross each other's distance, not toward the superficial desire exit, but like the English title Closer, honestly approach each other, and finally achieve a love?