They were, he says, "very smart and very funny", lovers of good food and drink who were also up for "lots of headbanging discussions of Marx and left-communist theorists such as Amadeo Bordiga.
Ms. Halliday's best moments are in the flirty duets she shares with her co-stars: "A Weekend Affair"/"Salt Air" with Mr. Russell, and especially "Just Another Page in Your Diary," a very funny lovers' quarrel with Mr. Zinnato, the most deft of the three performers.
But "Canciónes," commissioned by the festival, was a wickedly funny take on lovers' roles and misalliances.
Hi and Ed are a funny pair of lovers because they have such ordinary middle-class family aspirations; what makes them appealing (and redeems the banality of those aspirations) is that they lose out.
It's also worth adding that these films, and others among the most exhilarating of recent Hollywood films, such as "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Funny People," "Two Lovers," or "Gentlemen Broncos," would have been absolutely unimaginable in earlier times.
"White Flowers," like "Lilac Garden," is about repressed desire, and Mr. Reeder, one of the most natural ballet choreographers to emerge in recent years, presented a wickedly funny portrait of lovers obsessed, but this time with members of their own sex.
I haven't seen "An Education" yet, and none of my choices for the best (Hollywood) movies of the year — "Fantastic Mr. Fox," "Funny People," "Two Lovers," and "Gentlemen Broncos" — are on the list ("Fantastic Mr. Fox" is up for best animation and best score).
This is not and was never going to be the fate that awaited Acker and Wark, who would make a bizarre but very entertaining pair for a promotional video not least because at the time they were writing they had funny haircuts, multiple lovers of different genders, and Wark was 34 and Acker 48.
Ricardo Torres especially, and Michele Wiles, Eric Otto and Karin Ellis-Wentz were aptly funny as the mortal lovers.
Yes, a bad marriage is a hideous thing that sucks in all the life around it, but some of the best writing on the subject acknowledges the darkly funny aspect of warring lovers and their witty cruelty to each other.
But Lin can be genuinely funny — as in the lovers' absurd riffs about Bruce Lee fighting 20 million driver ants — and he provides accurate, often filthy dispatches on what it is to be young and pushing against the world.
