Lost Love Montage

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A variant of the "Falling in Love" Montage where the love in question is in the past. Sappy music is playing while all of the wonderful scenes are shown from the now severed relationship, as the person in question realizes how good he had it.

Contrast with "Falling in Love" Montage and Sad Times Montage. If the person has a particular item or keepsake of their lost love's that they kept, this may become a Cradle of Loneliness.

When the character watches home videos of their past life, see Happier Times Montage, which is closely related. See also Troubled Backstory Flashback.

No real life examples, please; Real Life does not have montages.

Examples of Lost Love Montage include:

Anime and Manga

  • Princess Ogen Iga and Danjou Koga in Basilisk: Kouga Ninpu Chuu. Even moreso in the anime, where the a good chunk of the first episode shows how they fell in love as youngsters but were tragically separated until their last battle and deaths.

Film

  • Casablanca features one showing the Paris relationship between Rick and Ilsa.
  • A variant in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Joel initially wants to erase his memories of Clementine after they have a bad break-up. As he relives his memories of her in backwards order as they're erased one by one, however, he realizes that they had a lot of happy times together and tries to stop the erasing process going on in his mind.
  • Used in Once. The music is particularly wistful.
  • Used in the film of the musical Rent during Roger's song "One Song Glory" to tell the story of his first girlfriend, April, without Mark's aside to the audience explaining their relationship. The montage shows April and Roger weeping together over the results of her positive HIV test, while in the original musical, Mark informs the audience that April merely left Roger a note saying "We have AIDS" before committing suicide.
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit? features something similar: Eddie Valiant looks over photographs of a happier past with his late brother Teddy and Dolores.

Live-Action TV

  • Inverted in Family Ties. Alex has one of these, when Ellen leaves to get engaged. The only thing is Alex and Ellen hadn't yet dated at this point. He was dating her roommate, but was falling in love with Ellen.
  • Subverted in That '70s Show. Kelso starts crying over breaking up with Jackie, but all his memories are of Jackie insulting him. Still, as this was what most of their relationship was based on, he was pretty visibly sad.
  • Used at the end of the BBC "Scene" programme's Two Of Us from 1987. Teenaged Matthew watches the train on which his boyfriend Phil is leaving with his, Phil's, girlfriend, and has a series of flashbacks of his and Phil's happy times together. In the version which was cut so as not to seem too gay-positive, this is it; in the original version, it turns out that Phil wasn't on that train after all, because he shows up immediately afterwards.

Music

  • The Orange Range song "Sayonara" uses a Lost Love Montage during the refrains as a way for the widow to reflect on her husband.

Theatre

  • In the musical Brigadoon, after Tommy and the town of Brigadoon have seemingly vanished forever from each other, he is seen talking with his fiancée in a New York bar, and her words accidentally become song cues in his mind, bringing up visions of the townspeople of Brigadoon and his lost love Fiona.

Video Games

  • Short one appears in one Dragon Age 2 trailer.
  • Mother 3 shows this between Flint and Hinawa almost immediately after news of the latter's death.

Western Animation

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