Illusions Cut To The Measure Of Desire: A Love Story

Fig. 1. Anca Daucikova - Kissing Hour (video), c. 2000

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

Sigmund Freud

'The longing to be, the act of falling, and the bliss of actually being in love are almost always thought of as quintessentially romantic states; which most of us experience more than once, though rarely as we had anticipated - or, alas, in ways we later care to remember. And what are love stories, if not anthems to the desires that engender, and the memories that embalm, the loves we win and lose in the course of our amatory lives? Though short, and not much more demanding than a Billboard ballad, Jaime Marques’ El paraíso perdido, 1999, is just such an anthem.'

Lucio Crispino (from Illusions Cut to the Measure of Desire: Varieties of Love in Jaime Marques’ Paradise Lost, 1999)