Film Review: MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE: An Independent Animated Marvel of Powerful Personal Introspection [Tribeca 2022]

My Love Affair with Marriage Review

My Love Affair with Marriage (2022) Film Review from the 21st Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Signe Baumane, featuring the voices of Dagmara Dominczyk, Matthew Modine, Cameron Monaghan, Stephen Lang, Erica Schroeder, Emma Kenney, Tanya Franks, Clyde Baldo, Najla Said, Dan Domingues, Florencia Lozano, Ruby Modine, Carolyn Baeumler, Christina Pumariega, and Tracy Thorne.

A labor of love about love is comically coincidental yet appropriately apt for Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage – a semi-autobiographical, independently-produced animated musical that’s been six years in the making (and even more, I suppose, if you count the life stories that inspired it).

Baumane is a true Renaissance Woman when it comes to her latest feature, because in addition to being the writer-director-producer triple threat she also serves as the film’s lead (and possibly only?) animator, editor, cinematographer, and set decorator. That auteur-ish, all-trades approach is evident in the film’s scrappy simplicity – both through the sketchy style of its characters’ designs and the near-clinical approach to its writing – but that in turn allows the filmmaker’s emotional brashness to play with an earnest creative ferocity. The rough scribbles of the characters contrast against a textured stop-motion background, thus pulling all our focus onto their physical and thematic pliability as Baumane morphs them from one metaphor to another at her will. Think Marjane Satrapi by way of Bill Plympton.

Set up as a memoir juxtaposed with a medical lesson, the film flows between Zelma’s life (assumedly a stand-in for Baumane, voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) and her brain activity, with colorful explainer segments narrated by an anthropomorphic brain cell (Michele Pawk). As Zelma bounces between goalposts of anger and infatuation and fear and euphoria, coming of age during the seismic cultural shift of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the cellular narrator is there to explain precisely what and why these synapses are firing off – the scientific shadow to Zelma’s lived emotions.

The film is a bit too literal at times, and that gives it a strange edutainment feeling that makes you wonder if you should’ve seen this back in your high school health class. But that blatancy allows Baumane to counter with striking personifications of the social pressures that push and pull Zelma in various directions. Her own anxieties are manifested by a chorus of siren-like Latvian peasant women, both praising and chiding her for her adherence to and diversion from traditional gender roles; her own tamped-down rage is a feral cat that needs constant surveillance lest it escape and hurt herself or others; her concept of true love is melting into an amorphous blob with someone else – quite literally, with two heads, four arms and four legs (and that’s not always as sexy as you might think).

That stark contrast in Zelma’s bildungsroman brings the psychological messiness of her journey to the forefront. The “Marriage” of the title is but a single aspect of Zelma’s initial understanding of love and her perceived societal role as a woman, and thus a love affair with it suggests the ultimate insignificance of it in her lifelong journey towards personal satisfaction. She doesn’t really “solve” marriage or any other concepts in her life reeking with culturally ingrained sexist expectations, but she does spend plenty of time reckoning with them and their endless slew of convolutions, and what to do with that awareness going forward. The film, then, is more about observations than it is tangible endgames, and about the propulsive power of personal revelations.

Dominczyk lends a level-headed temerity to Zelma, and the rest of the voice cast’s directness suggests an alluring false sense of security that’s around every corner of Zelma’s world (with Modine and Monaghan being the two stand-outs). But Baumane’s acting through her animation work is the true star here, as she reminds us of the limitless creative potential the medium (and independent artwork on the whole) has to offer. It’s also a testament to cinema’s role as the tried-and-true vehicle of personal retrospection that it is – the Empathy Machine, if you will. If that’s considered a vanity project, then it’s worth it to be a little self-absorbed.

Rating: 7/10

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