A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that, in 2015, about half of adult Chicagoans had never been married, up from 42 percent a decade earlier. I expect that trend to accelerate even more rapidly after this weekend, when Joachim Lafosse’s anguished Belgian drama After Love and Lake Bell’s spirited satire I Do . . . Until I Don’t arrive simultaneously on local screens. After Love focuses on the crumbling union between an upper-class woman and the husband she’s been supporting financially, a situation complicated by their little twin daughters and the husband’s unwillingness to go. I Do . . . Until I Don’t revolves around a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the demise of marriage, which entails airing the dirty laundry of two unhappy couples. I Do, true to its genre, ends more happily than After Love, but both movies find endless tension where intimacy is enforced by law.
Deep down, both these couples really do love each other, whereas Marie (Bérénice Bejo), the protagonist of After Love, has already given up on her spouse. Boris (Cédric Kahn), her husband of 15 years, has moved out of the house at her insistence but won’t follow the rules of their agreement, showing up whenever he pleases to spend time with their identical, school-age twins, Jade and Margaux. When Boris tells the girls they can have ice cream, Marie overrules him; after she leaves the room, the girls giggle at Boris’s emasculation, and he joins in. The more Marie tries to disengage from him, the harder he digs in; to her dismay, her wealthy mother, Christine (Marthe Keller), wants to hire Boris, who’s been out of work for years, to make renovations on her home. Except for Marie, everyone wants the marriage to continue, but she can’t change the way she feels. Throwing a little dinner party, she confides in a friend that she can’t be in the same room with Boris anymore; naturally he crashes the party, making himself at home and goading her friends.
Directed by Joachim Lafosse
I Do . . . Until I Don’t ★★Directed by Lake Bell
