An interpretation of meaning of colors in the movie "Down with Love"

The colors have great influence in our way to see things. Some colors can represent themselves as stimulant, optimist, serene, peaceful, negative, depressive. Once you recognize the power of the color, you can use them as stimulus to provide information to the audience, you can capture its attention for what you consider as most important.

Analyzing the movie Down to Love we can see a mix of different colors ranging from blue, and green, red, yellow, pink to white. When the main character (Barbara) gets into her apartment, she experiences a sensation of “world of colors”, which means a magic world, full of wonderful experiences and happiness, i.e., perfect world. As we can see in the scene, Barbara’s apartment looks more like a doll’s house than a real world, even her telephone is pink. It seems like the character wants to hide something about herself, about her identity, and because of that she hides behind the curtain of fashion. She writes about sexual and emotional liberation of women and how them must leave love behind, in order to enjoy the sex as men do. As a woman who encourages others to have such behavior, she looks more like a romantic person - because pink evokes love, pure love – than a woman who doesn’t care about love, marriage, etc.

Figure 1. The perfect world of Barbara in the movie Down with Love.

In relation to Catcher Block, the guy that she likes, his affairs always wear blue, because this color represents for him a pursuit of pleasure. In the other hand, Barbara presents a collection of dresses with distinct colors. The different colors of her dress state the phase of humor that she is going through. It changes from the yellow, when she is very exciting about meeting Catcher Block to violet demonstrating her irritation about the postponing meeting with Catcher.

As we could see in the scene, the main color is pink, which means a mix of red with white. In my culture I’d say that represents a romance, but not a romance related to the sexual act, but to spiritual love. The violet also represents a feeling of anger and the yellow happiness.