To be sure, the plot of the movie does have the broad outline of a love story. A man, John Hurt (The Elephant Man, A Man for All Seasons), meets a woman, played by an unknown British actress, and they embark on a difficult relationship. Unfortunately, the "difficulty" in their relationship is that they live in a futuristic, totalitarian society which forbids love. (It is unfathomable why the movie is entitled "1984", when it is so obviously set in the future.)
Certainly there is nothing wrong with telling a story about forbidden love (consider Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet), but 1984 relegates the love story to a secondary status, spending more time depicting the dehumanizing influences of the society. The viewer can take only so many of these scenes -- involving dingy surroundings, tired, gray workers, and discussions of the decimation of history and language -- before he gets bogged down in a sense of utter despair, hardly the mood a romance is supposed to engender.
And all that is before the movie gets really depressing. Eventually the lovers are caught and carted off to prison (ironically called the "Ministry of Love"). The audience never finds out exactly what happens to the woman, but we see all too clearly what Hurt undergoes. It turns out that the authorities don't merely want to make Hurt pay for his "sex crime," or to make him publicly repudiate it, they want him to actually loathe the love he felt for the woman. This calls for especially extreme torture, and the audience sees every second of it.
These prison scenes also give the writers a chance to really cut loose with their anti-humanist, Skinnerian philosophy. Between tortures Hurt and his jailer, the late Richard Burton (The Wild Geese), talk about the society they live in, and Hurt loses every debate. Time and time again Hurt raises a point about love or kindness or hope, Burton bats it down, and writers choose not to have Hurt raise a counter point. Finally, after a particularly brutal torture (which the viewer is all but forced to look away from) Hurt gives in and truly renounces his love for the girl.
The final scene removes any remaining doubt that this might be even a tragic romance. The two former lovers, freed after their "rehabilitation," meet. They are distant, indifferent to one another, and after trading inanities they go their separate ways. Finally, in his closing lines, Hurt proclaims that his love has shifted to Big Brother, the leader of the entirely un-romantic society he lives in. The final hope for tenderness has received its final kick in the face.
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(Updated August 23, 1998.)