“This is the closest I can get to love”

How can you capture love? Not just the butterflies and passion, but all the intricate layers of it. The film How to Fall Out of Love (Jak się odkochać, 2025) by Varvara Zarytska grabbed the camera and tried to get us as close as possible to love and capture its intimate, raw, and naked parts.

The camera could be perceived as the main protagonist. We can observe a unique perspective of the camera being alive, at first sight easily mistaken for a documentary. It is given movement and can enter the most sensitive moments, but also a voice — being able to speak, to ask, to reveal. The camera follows the lovers around, trying to capture what love is, sometimes too up close for the viewer to feel uncomfortable.

Following the story of the camera and the woman behind it is more interesting than you first realise. The camerawoman is at first sight perceived as a friend of the girl. In some scenes you can feel uncomfortable about how close and deeply involved she is in her friend’s relationship. She is allowed to enter the most intimate of moments. But it gets more twisted at the end when she reveals that she is the reason the relationship ended — she is the girl with whom the boyfriend had cheated. That is the moment you realise she was present all along in many different layers of her friend’s relationship. She wasn’t just an observer or “researcher” of love, but an active participant in this little experiment.

And as honest as the camera pretends to be — being right there, observing the truest, most raw forms of love — the actual truth is hidden by the lens. And the truth is: that love is more complicated than it seems, and the reality of it can be distorted by the lens we are looking through.

The moments that resonate with the viewer are often created by the magic of the camera. A close-up of a boy, observing the features of his face, the light in his eyes, nearly feeling the vibrating love of the girl holding the camera. But this is the closest she can get. Unable to enter his mind or explore his thoughts, left only to trust that his feelings for her are as “real” as hers are.

A blurred shot on the balcony, when the couple is asked “what love is,” offers the viewer haptic visuality (Laura U. Marks): combining the meaning of the scene with the portrayal of its textures. This technique works really well with the fact that the film was shot on film. It captures the layers of love that we have yet to encounter — how it is more of an abstract feeling than something that can be properly captured. Or as is suggested later by the male protagonist: an illusion. And maybe the girl with a broken heart could tell us about memory as just a distorted image of reality.

The naked scenes were the underlying layer of the depiction of love, but also one of the most important ones. You are most vulnerable when you are naked, and yet it takes the most trust to do so. The final scene with the girl behind the camera — the girl who broke the relationship, the director getting naked — was important in establishing what it takes to build trust and form love, and how easily it can be ruined. The illusion of love.

Watching this film, you feel like an intruder. As an audience, you are part of something intimate, yet you are searching for an answer to the question asked right away: “what is love?” The complexity of this question slowly unravels as we get to know all the people included in the love and the act of loving. And maybe at the end of this short film, you will feel like those clothes in the washing machine — drenched by the process of going through the same cycle over and over again, but at the end cleaned of all the filth of life. The cyclic nature of the short film portrays being in the same places while living a significantly different reality.