Drugstore Romance (1979) - Paul Vecchiali

​A distillation of affect and its indescribable yet undeniable power, Drugstore Romance wonderfully exhibits the purity of impulse disentangled from positive or negative connotations. Melodrama utilized to interrogate emotion - its impracticality, transience, and omnipresence - Paul Vecchiali's Drugstore Romance reminded me a lot of John Cassavetes' oeuvre in the way it obfuscates cinematic form, narrative logic, and social expectation to reach for a more pure understanding of what it means to live, what it means to love. The material outcome doesn't seem to interest Vecchiali so much as the psychological and cognitive journey. Drugstore Romance is a rich, messy tapestry of emotion and melodic melodrama uninterested in subscribing binary notions of right or wrong to this brazen pursuit of love - it's interested in truth, which is far more complex than the romanticism we often associated with desire, connection, and love. The interiority of emotion, the transient nature of affect, and the interplay between our internal impulses and external reality are beautifully captured with a cinematic grammar that masterfully uses editing techniques such as exquisitely placed insert shots that are inscribed with invoking emotion and the interiority of its characters. What I think struck me so much with Drugstore Romance is how it doesn't attempt to comprehend something as incalculable or unquantifiable as desire. It seeks truth and in a sense rejects dialectics, focusing on an ontology in which prescribed answers to the nature of being are inconsequential at best or fool-hearted pursuits at worst.