Family drama

I saw a film last night on DVD, one I had been meaning to see for a while.

The basic plot is simple: A middle-age married couple, married for twenty years, have been raising their two wonderful teenagers. During a time when the parents are going through an emotional crisis in their relationship, a charming interloper enters their lives, acts very friendly, forms an emotional bond with their kids, and then starts a clandestine affair with one of the parents.

In the end, the family survives. The couple realize they need to get past the betrayal of the affair (and the crisis between the two of them that had made such a thing possible), and focus instead on treasuring the many years of love and hard work they’ve put into their marriage and into raising their two wonderful children. The interloper is firmly told to leave.

Seems simple, right? The immense amount of loving effort that goes into two people raising their kids and building a family is vastly more valuable than the empty promise of escape offered by an amour fou. I mean, who would ever think otherwise?

Yet as I look at reviews of this film on the internet, I’ve seen a shocking amount of vituperation leveled at this movie. People who watched the film seem angry that the couple do not break up. Some reviewers are furious that the stranger who casually sailed into their lives, who had put no work into building a family, or in providing for and caring for those two children all those years, is cast out. I’ve rarely seen so many angry reviews of a film on the internet.

I suppose at this point I should confess that there’s something I’m not telling you. Something that in a sane world shouldn’t make any difference. But then, we don’t live in a sane world.

5 thoughts on “Family drama”

  1. That is indeed the film. Both Andras and Sharon knew that immediately, but they were both nice enough to let it wait a few days so that other people could read the blog post and think about it. But now it has been a few days, so I guess it’s ok for people to know. 🙂

    I’m not sure what you mean about a “dirty secret” though. The information I was withholding in my post was only that the gender mix was non-standard — since the married couple consists of two women. The fact that she has an affair with a man isn’t something I would call a “dirty secret”. She’s clearly bisexual, and he’s an attractive guy.

    One thing I love about this movie is the way it illuminates the prejudices of audience members who do not think of themselves as prejudiced. Because of the genders of the parents, many people who watch the movie seem to throw out their common sense, to lose track of which characters have been nourishing and caring for those children all their lives, and of what’s really at stake for those kids.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *