Relationship Spotlight: Adam Fenwick-Symes & Nina Blount (Bright Young Things)

I’d say this is a relationship (based on the movie – haven’t read the original novel) that, more than anything, is just interesting.  While Nina and Adam certainly have their moments, they’re both too immature through much of the film to really constitute any sort of epic love story.  But like I said, they’re interesting to me, two people who genuinely care about each other but can’t get their respective acts together long enough to make it work.  (Adam/Nina-related spoilers.)

Like the other bright young things, Adam and Nina live almost entirely in the moment.  They sometimes seem to exist party to party, and the combination of youth, disposable income (that may or may not be, in fact, actual,) and no responsibilities is a potent one.  They forever pitch themselves between dizzying heights and wretched lows.  Adam, for instance, is always either flush with cash (sometimes remarkably so) or utterly penniless, a state that can shift in minutes, and as such, he’s either triumphant or despondent most of the time.  Since the culmination of his engagement to Nina hinges on his being able to provide for her, this means that Adam and Nina are generally on the brink of the altar or destined never to marry at all, with nothing in between.

It’s hard for any relationship to withstand that much drama, and Nina and Adam really aren’t equipped to handle it.  As Adam vacillates wildly between infinite wealth and abject poverty, Nina grows restless.  She’s not used to waiting for anything – the nightly parties they attend are all about instant gratification – and it’s easy to see why Adam wouldn’t instill confidence.  Although she likes him better than any other man she’s gone with, she can’t rely on him, and her itchy feet start edging toward greener pastures.  And, naturally, they fall out just as passionately and inconsistently as they get on together; one minute they’re vowing it’s absolutely definitely the end, and the next they’re orbiting one another again, getting ever closer to each other.

When they are together, though, and when they’re not careening between success and crisis, I like them a lot.  Considering the high drama that follows them and the frenzy of their nightlife, they can be surprisingly contented when it’s just them.  They’re wonderfully sweet sitting in the back of a hired car, realizing they haven’t actually figured out where they want to go, and I love the scene where Adam, again thinking he’s come into enough money to marry Nina, is dancing elatedly around her flat and she just stands off to the side watching him.  Similarly, I like how they tend to find their own little corner at parties, enjoying the revel but ultimately enjoying each other more.  If they could tap into that easy companionability a little more and chase histrionics a little less, they could save themselves a great deal of time and emotional upheaval.

One of my favorite moments of theirs isn’t even altogether happy, but I like it because it beautiful illustrates Nina’s feelings when we get Adam’s far more often.  During one of Adam’s roller coaster acquisition-and-loss-of-wealth sessions, he’s rung her once to say they can’t get married, again to say the wedding’s back on, and a third time to say they can’t get married after all.  Since they’re on the phone, Adam of course can’t see her, and her ultimate reply is detached and breezy, but there’s the slightest pause before she says, “Adam, you bore, why not?” and you can feel in that moment how devastated she is, how she needs that second to assume the indifferent air required to cover her sadness.  And that, I think, is Nina and Adam in a nutshell.  They both love each other and want to be together, but somehow, they keep just missing each other, unable to make it to the same page.