Love and Marriage
Happily Ever After does justice to romantic wanderlust
Movies about relationships have often gravitated toward the extremes in the intergender hate-fests of Neil LaBute and Woody Allen. The French drama Happily Ever After is therefore all the more delightful and rare for addressing marriage's lonely, fragile dimensions.
Achingly truthful, Happily Ever After spans a spectrum from sour, combative relationships to seemingly soulful, decent ones, and finds moments of tenderness in both.
On the side of horrendous marriages is Georges (Alain Chabat), a luxury hotel manager who bickers constantly with his flamboyantly feminist wife, Nathalie, played by the always enjoyable Emmanuelle Seigner (Bitter Moon), who seems to have made playing charismatic harridans a specialty. Nathalie perpetually challenges her husband's conventional macho attitudes, and their home has become a gender battleground.
Georges' legs quiver with anxiety as he watches his son gleefully play with the toy vacuum cleaner Nathalie bought to prove a feminist point. The scene is typical of director Yvan Attal's ability to be clever without sacrificing insight and consideration for his characters' private agonies. And Attal (who also stars in the film alongside real life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg) always leaves room for redemption and conciliation in surprising places. There is sudden, unexpected lust and affection that crops up even in the poison-laced union between Georges and Nathalie. And despite the sexual misbehavior of Georges' two best friends - the married Vincent (Attal) and playboy bachelor Fred (Alain Cohen), who work at the same Mercedes dealership - they are never made to stand in for flat, token representatives of their gender.
Most of the emotional gut-punch of the film comes in the richly observed marriage between Vincent and his wife, Gabrielle (Gainsbourg). From the outside, Vincent and Gabrielle's marriage looks solid. They keep their sex life honed by staging elaborate seduction scenarios in nightclubs and riotous food-fights.
But the ordinary attrition of marriage is intruding. There are quarrels over sacrifices of freedom and individuality that Attal expresses in moody but also remarkably graceful ways. Attal conveys all the yearning and unmet desires that drive a marriage to ruin in one sublime, incomparable scene that feels like the molten emotional core of the whole film.
At a record store listening station, Gabrielle is absorbed in Radiohead's "Creep." She's joined at the headsets by a beautiful stranger (Johnny Depp), and suddenly time stands still. They steal glances at each other as the song rises to a crescendo. Gabrielle soaks in the man's face with an expression somewhere between moony adoration and unbearable sadness. A complicated brew of emotions emerges: a need for escape, a reminder of certain painful impossibilities, and a projection of all of one's needs onto a convenient, idealized crush. The moment of "what if?" fantasy finds its perfect accompaniment in the cavernous Virgin Megastore with its anonymous ebb and flow of people who serve to emphasize Gabrielle's solitude.
Gainsbourg is remarkable as a woman who senses something deeply wrong with her marriage but for myriad reasons can't break away. Attal has done a great service to his wife and to her gender, showing how, amid the guy-on-guy joshing, female desire reverberates as a low-key but insistent chorus.
Even the way Attal treats the jokey, cavalier machismo traded between the men rises above the expected. Attal manages to make clichés like Georges' desire for a new Mercedes seem like some poignant, displaced desire for an escape from the drudgery of his unhappy marriage.
Attal excels at the nonverbal dimensions to film and relationships, where so many other directors have favored angst-ridden talk-fests. In place of verbal pyrotechnics, there is a wonderfully apropos soundtrack, which stands in for his characters' buzzing mindscapes of lust and despair. Attal is as attuned to the emotional power of music as Martin Scorsese, and his visual style steeped in moody '60s-era touches works in perfect harmony with the angst-laced musical reveries.