Austin Film Festival 2010

Both Gosling and Williams deliver truly amazing and honest performances as a couple in this intimate and shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage. On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy and Dean are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel where they went years earlier, when they met and fell in love—full of life and hope.  Moving fluidly between these two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go? Framing the film as a mystery whose answer lies scattered in time and in character, filmmaker Derek Cianfrance constructs an elegant set of dualities: past and present, youth and adulthood, vitality and entropy. The rigor of his process is visible throughout the film. Eliminating artificial devices, he has only the truth of the characters to work with. Derek Ciamfrance in attendance