SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!
Three ‘Bukowskian’ torrid nights in the life of a man in search of love. Harry Voss, 12, is young and naive. Love, for him, is romantic love between princes and princesses demurely kissing each other on the mouth. His father is a hero who kidnapped his mother and married her on a lonely mountain peak… Later on, he’ll do the same. But Harry has a lot to learn. He learns about ‘being hot’ and ‘fucking’ and about what you have to do when you’re alone and ‘feel the itch’. He also learns that there are handsome men and ugly ones, that love can be unfair. That one can find comfort in drinking… but above all he learns that man is capable of anything – absolutely anything! – to get his fair share of love.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Crazy Love Plot Summary and Synopsis
The movie follows Harry Voss during three important days of his life. The first is as a youth, the second on the day of his high school graduation and the third as a lonely, middle-aged man.
The phases of his life show the destruction of hope and innocence and his descent into cynicism, alcoholism and hopelessness. Idealizing romantic love with a beautiful girl in his childhood, he is bitterly disappointed when the real world does not match the idealized images of love in his own imaginings.
He then discovers as a teenager his peers consider him an outcast due to his chronic and physically disfiguring cystic acne, which covers his face, chest, shoulders and back in weeping pus-filled sores and repulses all who see him. He turns to alcohol to kill the pain and disappointment, losing all hope of finding true love, only to end up destitute, as an alcoholic in later adulthood.
Only through a freak chance encounter late in his life is he transported back to his innocent memories of childhood and the idealized love of a beautiful girl that he craved in his youth.
Finally fulfilled, he dies by wading out into the open ocean after finding his only “true” love – a “crazy love”. The irony of the “hollowness” of this lost, idealized, love, and the tragic significance Harry places on this single event, sums up his lost life and finally makes him the hero of his own story.
Each of the three phases filmed involves a sexual encounter with a “passive” female. In the first phase, the child is pushed into a sexual encounter with a friend’s attractive mother whilst she is sleeping, drunk, in her bed at home.
In the second, a girl lies passively in the back seat of a car, uninterested, whilst he attempts to have sex with her.
She does it only as a favor to her boyfriend who is friends with Harry, but cannot carry through in the end and turns away in disgust at his appalling cystic acne.
In the third, as an older alcoholic, he and his drunk friend stumble upon a fresh corpse and “steal” it as a joke, only for Harry to find that the dead – but still warm – girl resembles the girl of his childhood dreams.
Crazy Love Ending
The next morning his friend finds Harry has committed suicide by intentionally walking out to sea with the corpse in his arms, apparently committing suicide after consummating his final desire.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).