電影《從前的我們》影評：[Film Review] Mr & Mrs Adelman (2017) 7.5/10

A labor of love of French actor-turned-director Nicolas Bedos and his actress companion Doria Tillier, MR & MRS ADELMAN is Bedos’ feature debut and scripted by both, it starts with a funeral of the predeceased titular Mr. Adelman, Victor (Bedos), a well-respected and successful novelist, then via the interview of a journalist (Gouy), Ms. Adelman, Sarah (Tillier), calmly relates their love/hate relationship, spanning 40-odd years, captioned by a dozen of chronological chapters and suffixed with a rousing twist in the epilogue that puts an entirely different perspective to their symbiosis.

Shot with a nimble-fingered, compulsively twirling and rotating camera, MR & MRS ADELMAN freewheels in an almost mercurial form through the tonal discrepancies derived from a mishmash of components: a heady rom-com about a girl sets eyes on her Mr. Right and never let him go, a cynical satire on a writer’s block (Victor’s unpremeditated fixation with being Jewish, he even alters his bourgeois, Gentile surname de Richemont to Adelman), fame and egregious ego, an astringent matrimonial drama plumbing a husband’s sexual frustration and a wife’s desperation to hold onto the breadwinner of the family, or a reportage on gender politics within a nuclear family, but between Victor and Sarah, the one who gets the oneupmanship is evident along the way, as the story is as much an affirmation of a wife’s high-wire maneuver of molding her husband into the man she wants (if not necessarily she worships) him to be, even without that final volte-face, as a no-holds-barred dissection of a tumultuous relationship that often blights a middle-class union where self-efficacy is foregrounded.

One must hand it to the couple for their pellucid discernment and dextrous facility of piecing together the whole spectrum of a robust, tactile affair of the heart, though they might err on the side of taking sides, Victor, hardly a charmer judged by his behavioral enormity (an egomaniacal, vainglorious, ingrained cheater riddled with pettiness and tantrum, even his artistic bent remains a moot point for most of the time), and a saintly Sarah, more often than not, takes the short end of the stick of being neglected, caviled, blamed, humiliated even imaginatively manhandled (glimpsed in Victor’s mind when the divorce takes him by surprise) by her narcissistic husband, even her tribulation is validated in the end (a fanciful revenge to get even with the last laugh?, the film has an arch but nasty suggestion of human’s dark side), still one cannot help but wondering what she sees in such a slouch in the first place, if that is the case, the movie’s woman-empowering overtures are half self-defeating.

That said, both Bedos and Tillier enliven the slightly paint-by-number drill of conjugal ups-and-downs with their lived-in commitment and pyrotechnics, especially for Tillier, a svelte, sylph-like being that is always alluringly indecipherable and multi-faceted, but at the same time, relatable down to the ground, certainly transcends the time-worn neglected wife’s woe to a mesmeric it-takes-two-to-tango complex.

referential entries: Bj?rn Runge’s THE WIFE (2017, 7.0/10); Claude Sautet’s CéSAR AND ROSALIE (1972, 7.5/10).