In the story The rampant baron by Italo Calvino, the noble Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò rejects earthly authoritarianism and chooses life in the trees forever. One fine day he learns that there are Spaniards who cannot touch the ground. Cosimo goes to them and meets Ursula. The two go by branches, they find themselves tight on a fragile pear tree and, with each gesture, they end up hugging each other. Thus begins the first love, which arrived unexpectedly: «beautiful you cannot understand why you could have imagined it beautiful before. And the newest thing about its beauty was being so simple ». It seemed to Cosimo then that it should always be like this. But then the story continues, a bad Jesuit snares them, and Cosimo will discover that simplicity is only of the first love.
Analysis of first loves
Umberta Telfener, a scholar of relationships, gave us an interesting, meditated, at times moving analysis of first loves using books, films as sources and “giving us” many cases encountered in his activity as a psychotherapist. I use the term “to give”, which occurs often in the book, because first love is an intimate experience. Unveiling it to others means giving away the period of our life in which space-time is compressed into something totalizing, pure, of unimaginable beauty. The first loves live inside a closed world undetectable from the outside.
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If we examine the first loves described in the films and books, we discover that they often end because external circumstances, the life of adults, the family, in short, the chaos of unforeseen possibilities and beyond the control of her and him (or of the two she or of the two Him).
It happens to Cosimo when the Spaniards return to Granada. It happens in the movie New paradise cinema because her family changes cities and there is a misunderstanding between her and him. A message is not delivered due to a misunderstanding and then it will re-emerge at the end of the film, too late, when by now she and him are mature adults and the cinema is about to be destroyed. It happens in Nabokov’s autobiography: the Russian revolution upsets the world and in a whirlwind of violence even the first love disappears.
Francois Truffaut
And so, first loves, at least in stories, mostly end due to adverse events, not decisions. In the history of cinema, François Truffaut was the only director to develop a cycle of five films in which Antoine Doinel (actor Jean-Pierre Léaud) ages passing from a child to an adult life with a progression of loves that, initially naive and simple, end then to get more complicated.