This is an elemental love - it could belong to any time were it not for the occasional contemporary accessories: a little black dress (metaphorical) and a mobile phone (actual).
Mr. Zhang, whose credits include "Red Sorghum," "Raise the Red Lantern, and "The Story of Qiu Ju," was a cinematographer before becoming a director, and his mastery of color and mood and his attunement to nature lend this elemental love story a penetrating hum of universality.
We had intuited an elemental truth: love needs no leash.
The exploration of that world was the path through which to get back to the basic elemental truths about love and human relationships.
Old songs, like "From Her to Eternity," "The Mercy Seat" and "Tupelo," were elemental struggles with love, death, God and fate; Mr. Cave's foulmouthed rewrite of "Stagger Lee" has added a verse in which Stagger Lee takes on Lucifer himself.
But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
You will notice that one elemental aspect of love is consistently absent in the realm of desire.
Aphrodite, who in Greek mythology arose from the foam of the elemental waters, celebrates love and sexuality as an embodied divinity.
""It's Only" speaks to something elemental, fire, water, love, but from a viewpoint that seems removed," Brown said in a statement.
While Gutcheon cannily evokes the ephemerality of passion, she also evinces, with stark and elemental resonance, the way love and hatred shape lives.
It left me with a lifelong wariness of Norse sagas, and a love for elemental imagery – of sea, rocks, storm, night, fire, water, home – whether in the work of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney or children's authors such as Geraldine McCaughrean.
