"My Love Affair With Marriage" - Tribeca Film Fest Review
Director Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair With Marriage has been six years in the making. It took 1,685 donors and multiple art and cultural grants for Baumane’s vision of an animated musical story of womanhood to come to fruition. The film is a better lesson about reproductive and sexual health than most American sex ed classes offer, and a quiet rumination about how a person’s understanding of love shifts as they grow up.
Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) is born in Soviet Union-ruled Latvia in the 1980s. The film follows her from when she is seven years old to when she is twenty-eight, and is loosely narrated by Biology (Michele Pawk) and Zelma’s own Greek chorus of Sirens (Trio Limonāde). The film introduces the audience to three men who play significant roles in different parts of Zelma’s life. They are Jonas (Stephen Lang), who is Zelma’s first sexual experience; her first husband, Sergei (Cameron Monaghan); and her second husband, Bo (Matthew Modine).
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My Love Affair With Marriage feels both intensely personal and painfully universal. Despite the different years and locations, the emotions Zelma experiences are eternal and ubiquitous. It’s oddly comforting to know that some things (crushes, teen angst, loneliness, etc.) know no boundaries. No matter how much the world changes throughout time, and no matter where a person is living, some things will always remain the same.
The animation in this film is a mixture of practical buildings and illustrations. There are 145 scenes in the movie and only a few reuse sets, so a huge burden was placed on the carpentry department. The sets are mainly built of wood that has been covered in paper-mâché and painted. After the sets were completed, they were photographed and the illustrated characters were overlaid. Compared to the glossy sheen of contemporary mainstream animation from studios like Dreamworks and Pixar, My Love Affair With Marriage is distinct. The characters feel more like Gary Larson’s The Far Side Gallery comics than scenes from Toy Story.
My Love Affair With Marriage is an ode to the uncomfortable awkwardness of womanhood. Zelma’s awareness of the pressures society has placed on women and her attempts to become her own person while dealing with these expectations are relatable. These expectations have changed between Zelma’s time and 2022, but the pressure to conform endures. My Love Affair With Marriage, despite grappling with the changing world of Latvia and the Soviet Union, is an internal film. It’s about how Zelma’s brain and her biology are at war with one another, and the struggle of discovering her place in the world.
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