Unrequited Love

Unrequited Love is about stalking. The film is based on the novel by Greg Dart and, according to the film makers, it is ‘a film essay on cinema, absence, Hitchcock and Antonioni: a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, modern technology (e-mail, mobiles, surveillance cameras) which defines both the urban stalker and the new breed of terrorist. Their methods duplicate: irrational and targeted. Stalking operates in the borders between normal love and pathological fantasy. Stalking wants nothing better than to move in and close the gap. Stalking is an externalised form of self-destruction. Stalkers are the fundamentalists of love.’ Petit’s unique, essayist film style is difficult to capture in a few words. He introduces discrepancies between image, music and sound, uses extreme wide-angle shots from impersonal security cameras and close-ups of action, makes post-modern use of other people’s texts (for instance by the Dominican writer Jean Rhys), with which he evokes a mood of alienation, confusion and passion in a possibly inhuman world. Chris Petit: ‘What a film is about and how I film it are the same: subject dictates style. I like films that show a process; here, the emotional transfer between stalker and stalked.’ (EH)

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