There’s a chemical and biological basis for the creation of Zelma, provided by an off screen narrator in My Love Affair With Marriage. Zelma is a cartoon character restless when we first meet her. She runs, she climbs a tree, she feeds an animal. She knows enough about life in this section of the film, which is designated as the Prelude. “But basic survival is just one part of life,” says our narrator.
We go with her to Riga where she goes to school. She gets attacked by a boy and she fights back. “She’s not a girl, she fights,” says one classmate. The others join in. She falls for a boy but is ignored. Maybe because she’s not lady-like? This narrative’s pattern is reinforced by a selection of songs that reminds us boys hate to feel small when it’s caused by girls. It’s not Disney because Disney deploys smoother characters. The sentimentality here is also edgier; plus, it’ll be a newsworthy day when the words hymen and vagina get into the Disney corpus, as happens in a single sentence here.
We follow her at several ages; the most eventful stage of her early life happens when she’s 17. Increasingly reckless, she heads to a gallery where she meets an older artist. She’s hopeful that he would get her into the world of art: “He would initiate me into the esoteric knowledge of art,” she says. But it is sex and abandonment that she gets from the old man. More affairs with men will follow.
The film’s actual narrative is backed by the narrator’s biological basis for what is happening, which forces such words as “prefrontal cortex”, “hypothalamus”, “limbic system” and “pituitary gland” into the consciousness, if not the vocabulary, of the viewer. But while those lessons are often entertaining and enlightening, it does halt the story’s momentum. A straightforward tale of a woman’s rather unfortunate place in the world thus gets more muscle but becomes slower.
Adding that muscle/module of science propels Signe Baumane’s film beyond the kind of pessimistic account of male and female relationships that are commonplace in serious cinema, but it potentially reduces its likability, since it stands to reason that not a lot of people like their examination of romance to come with science lessons.
And yet, it must be said that My Love Affair With Marriage is superbly well-written—as in its winning description of a kissing scene, involving two different people—and its 2-D visuals are both quirky and interesting to look at. And Baumane appears to know this. Her character Zelma says an art piece hanging on a wall is “perverse and innocent at the same time,” as though commenting on the film she has made. But a little alteration is required: Baumane’s film is both innocent and realist, sometimes achieving both in a single frame.
Take one scene where an ex seeks out Zelma. His solicitation is represented by his face poking out of an analogue telephone as he beseeches his former beloved. Ignoring his pleas to return, she pushes his face back into the receiver. Baumane’s film is full of such clever details and, along with stagnating science lessons, it provides an engaging study of the geographical and bureaucratic barriers to marriage. Falling in love with a stranger is easy, it says, but marrying a stranger isn’t quite as easy.
Its universal subject of love, sex, and romance should find adult audiences across regions—even with its science lessons, which, mercifully, trickles to significantly lower levels in the film’s brilliant and hopeful third act.
Director, Screenplay, Cinematographer: Signe BaumaneVoice cast: Dagmara Dominczyk, Stephen Lang, Matthew Modine, Cameron Monaghan
Producers: Roberts Vinovskis, Sturgis Warner, Signe Baumane, Raoul Nadalet
Editor: Signe Baumane, Sturgis Warner
Art Director: Signe Baumane
Music: Kristian Sensini
Sound: Pierre Vedovato
Production companies: The Marriage Project in association with Locomotive Productions, Antevita Films
Sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
In English
108 minutes
