Tearjerkers

Every week on his blog The Medium Is Not Enough, Rob (aka MediumRob, when he comments here) posts a TV or film related meme, which usually I answer in the comments section there. This week's meme, however, deserves a post here all of its own. The question simply is: what's the most tear-jerking movie you've ever seen and why?

So here's the thing. I am a full-on, unashamed movie blubber. If you are going to see a sad film with me, bring extra tissues because I will be needing them. I don't think there is anything that makes me cry more than films, except perhaps really unhelpful customer service, and missing trains, but that's a whole different post.

I should probably warn here - this post will no doubt be full of spoilers, because I am going to talk about very sad films and what makes them very sad, and maybe some of the films in question you won't know are sad or why. So reader beware...

The first film I remember making me cry was Out of Africa, which I saw in the cinema when it came out in 1985. I was nine. As I recall the bit that really got to me is when Meryl Streep can't bring herself to throw the handful of earth on Robert Redford's grave. I managed to hold it together until we got outside, but then in the street outside the Swiss Cottage Odeon my whole body went into judders. My oldest sister asked me what the matter was, and I just about managed to say "It's sooooo sad" before I was engulfed in huge, racking sobs.

From then on my sister instigated the tear test, in which, at any potentially tear-jerking juncture in any film we were watching, she would shove her finger underneath my eyelid to see if I was crying yet. She also gained huge pleasure from taking me into her bedroom, playing the theme from Watership Down on her record player, and telling me the saddest story she could think of, usually involving a dying animal, until I wept.

There were, of course, any number of films which got me teary in the interim, but the next full-on sob-fest that stayed in my memory was Beaches, which I watched by myself on video in the living room of the family home. Looking back, I can't remember what exactly it was about Beaches that got to me, but I suspect it has to do with the protracted and painful death of selfless but beautiful Barbara Hershey from cancer while her traitorous but repentant best friend Bette Midler looked on and then wrote a soppy song about it. Yes, that's probably it. Again I made every possible effort to hold it in and managed to get across to the video player, press stop, and get halfway back across the room before collapsing into floods of tears. What was significant about Beaches is that it was the first time that I knew *even as I was crying* that I had been manipulated by a shamelessly sentimental heap of tripe.

I got older, I got tougher, I learnt the ways of the world. The crying did not stop. If anything, it got worse.

Take Atonement, for example, which I went to see with a new friend, after which - despite (or because of?) having read the book, and knowing exactly what was coming - I was so hysterical I couldn't leave my seat in the cinema, and had to wait while the whole of the rest of the room filed out, nudging each other and whispering "what's the matter with her?" Or Miss Austen Regrets, which was on TV a while back, and is about Jane Austen of course, looking back over her life as a spinster author and wondering whether the brilliance of her career was an adequate replacement for the lack of romantic love and and children. Inexplicably I identified with her predicament - I know, it's weird - and I cried pretty much all the way through from the beginning, so when Jane Austen actually died (she does die at the end, I hope that's not a spoiler) it barely registered.

But I think the most embarrassing of all was The Lives of Others, which my parents took me to see on my 31st birthday, a few months after I had signed the publishing deal for Gods Behaving Badly. In the lobby on the way in, we happened to run into Dan Franklin - my editor and the head of Jonathan Cape - and his wife in the lobby. My parents had never met them, so we chatted pleasantly for a while before taking our seats. As chance would have it, we were in the row directly behind them. For those of you who don't know, The Lives of Others is one of the most brilliant and unbearably sad films made in the last few years, filled with moments of selfishness and selflessness, love, betrayal, misunderstanding, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, death, redemption - any one of which could make me cry, but all at once? I cried my eyes out in the film, but managed to pull myself together and thought I was going to get out of the cinema OK, until I saw the name of one of the characters (Christa-Maria, the writer's wife, for those who know the film) in the end credits, which set me off again. Which normally would not have been a problem. My parents are used to this. However, what doesn't usually happen is that I have to stand in the lobby of the cinema making small talk with my publisher while chocking on vast, engulfing sobs. I was crying too hard to even be able to say goodbye. Eventually I sort of waved and walked away, but then - but then!! - almost immediately walked into an old schoolfriend of mine who I hadn't seen for some years, who was there with her new husband who I had never met, and had to do a whole other round of small talk ("How was the wedding? How lovely!") with tears streaming down my face.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say that I love a sad movie. And there is nothing worse than a film which promises a wealth of weeping but does not deliver. Love Story, I'm looking at you.