So Long Sad Love
So Long Sad LoveCreator: Mirion Malle
Translator: Aleshia Jensen
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication Date: April 2024
“I don’t think i’m afraid anymore.
I Think I’m Happy.”
–Cléo (Played by Corinne Marchand), in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
An epigraph can often impact how one understands a work. For example, a few years back, I read Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties, a rather “Not for me” kind of book as preparation for writing a piece on the comic adaptation of it by Rio Youers and Alison Sampson (which I rather liked, but didn’t quite love).
Among the changes to the graphic adaptation was the decision to remove what I felt was a rather groan worthy epigraph regarding. When reading the initial novel, this quickly turned me against the book due to the sheer level of groan worthiness that quote inspired. Whereas, when reading the comic book adaptation, I was more willing to go along with the narrative and the characters within.
I bring this up because So Long Sad Love opens with the above quote from Cléo from 5 to 7. The Agnès Varda movie follows the life of a young woman for the time mentioned as she engages with the world. It’s a rather charming slice of life picture about coping with one’s mortality. (I will note this is based more on memory than having recently seen the film. As such, some details might have been lost.)
So Long Sad Love, does not engage with those themes. Instead, the quote (and, subsequently, the main character’s name) are used to explore a woman’s experience with isolation. More specifically, the isolation brought about by being in an extremely toxic relationship with a real piece of shit. We follow Cléo as she slowly begins to piece together the sheer number of red flags her boyfriend has had, including the appearance of a woman named Farah who is, according to the boyfriend and all of his friends, “a crazy bitch.”
Mirion Malle’s comic does a wonderful job highlighting the various intricacies and complexities of this doomed and collapsing relationship. Several sequences highlight Cléo’s misery and uncertainty towards the man she loves. It’s a good experience overall.
And yet, I hesitate to call it a great one. One of the things I recall loving about Cléo from 5 to 7 was the film’s usage of silence. Moments where we simply breathe with Cléo as she goes about her day. Periods where we aren’t engaged with the plot so much as exploring a space. By contrast, So Long Sad Love seems extremely tied to its plot. We never get moments where Cléo and Farah talk to one another outside of the context of their relationship with the boyfriend. We don’t have Cléo and Syham, her best friend, hang out with one another outside of a montage about the sheer cruelty of a toxic ex.
The point might be to act as a contrast between the two halves of the book. Where the front half is about the toxic relationship, the back half explores life after the wreckage. How Cléo has grown and changed as a person because of her experiences. And, for what it’s worth, she does seem happier being around people who are her friends and not her boyfriend’s.
But I don’t feel that there’s much difference between how these two stories are being told. There are certainly warmer colors to the second half of the comic (especially in the ending spread, which is really beautiful), but there’s still very little silence. The only thing people seem able to do here is talk to one another. The frequency of words worked well in the first half as it allowed the reader to be as overwhelmed by the world as Cléo is. But keeping the same wall of text in the second half weakens the implications of the first.
And I’m thinking back to Cléo from 5 to 7, which used silence and nonverbal discussion expertly. How not everything needed to be laid out in a monologue or a conversation. How we could understand these people simply by looking at the images.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a pretty good comic with some lovely cartooning. I liked it just fine. But I didn’t love it.
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