I Do and I Don't

by Jeanine Basinger

  What movies like Rebecca and Suspicion tell audiences is that women are more vulnerable in marriage than men are. They have more to lose. Women need marriage emotionally; men don’t. A woman can’t hire someone to love her and support her, but a man can get a good maid—and there’s always his mother. As it all turns out, both Olivier and Grant really love Fontaine, but she’s the one who had to worry. Olivier had an unfaithful wife (the adultery problem) who was dying of cancer, and Grant was badly short of hard cash (the money problem). These issues put the two husbands out of sorts and made them even a bit suicidal … but, again, it was Fontaine who had to do the worrying.

  Is it murder or misunderstanding?—that old marriage bugaboo. Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine are locked into a lack of awareness of each other that lasts until the very end of Hitchcock’s Suspicion. (Photo Credit 2.90)

  One truly great movie in which a husband tries to kill his wife perfectly captures the lure of the murderous variation of the marriage movie. Sunrise (1927) is unquestionably a visual masterpiece, but it tells a very simple story. A young farmer (George O’Brien) is lured into the bushes (literally) by an exotic “woman from the city” (Margaret Livingston) for a sexual encounter that sets him on fire and opens him to the excitement of sin. He decides to murder his sweet little wife (Janet Gaynor, in a luminous, Oscar-winning performance). This is all there is to it—he wants what he wants and his wife is in the way. She must go. But the creation of the events cinematically lifts the film upward into one of those mysterious explanations of the unexplainable—no one in the average movie audience would ever do such a thing, and yet everyone understands. Everyone gets every moment of it, from his excitement, his plan, his bungled attempt, his wife’s horrified response, her subsequent fear of him, their slow journey back into themselves, his nearly losing her to drowning in a storm, and their return to normal, back at the farm, still alive, still man and wife. Sunrise is about the mystery of any one marriage, the inexplicable nature of a successful union. Everything movies have to offer—the beauty of an image, camera movement, set decoration, lighting, superb acting—combines to present a haunting, mysterious evocation of the rigors of marriage, its ups and downs, its need for escape, its need for a reliable unity, and its anger, disappointment, and bizarre behavior. As is true of lesser films, Sunrise gives—here’s sex outside of marriage with a woman from the city—and then it takes back: a restoration to normalcy that teaches the lesson that true love and marriage are the better things to have. For once, however, the lesson is both art and entertainment. For once, the marriage movie finds its true purpose: to evoke the unexplainable nature of the union.

  Sunrise depicts a married man’s dilemma. George O’Brien has got himself a pretty, sunny little wife (Janet Gaynor), and she loves him … (Photo Credit 2.91)

  … but also out there in the reeds lurks temptation: the dark and sexy other woman “from the city” (Margaret Livingston) who can teach him a thing or two. What’s a man to do? (Photo Credit 2.92)

  Were all these marriage problems unique to America? Three marriage movies from differing cultures are the French Bed and Board (1970), directed by François Truffaut, the Swedish Scenes from a Marriage (1973), directed by Ingmar Bergman, and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), from the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Admittedly, these films are all personal cinema under the guidance of recognized directors, but each in its own way reflects the culture and attitudes of its own country of origin while still reflecting the same fundamentals as its American counterparts.

  Bed and Board is the fourth movie about Truffaut’s famous character Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. (Antoine is sort of a French Andy Hardy, a boy who grows up and finds love, adventure, knowledge, and a little maturity in a series of movies.) In Bed and Board, Antoine is in his late twenties and married to Christine (Claude Jade). They are a larky young couple clearly not ready for the responsibilities of married life. She gives music lessons, but forgets to charge her pupils. He works for a florist, dyeing white carnations red and ruining most of them. She buys a photo of her crush, Rudolf Nureyev, to hang above their bed, and he peeks into the top of her nightgown and dubs her breasts Laurel and Hardy. What are their problems? They don’t make enough money. Her parents are ever present in their lives. Unexpectedly they have a baby, who becomes his rival for her attention. He becomes enchanted by a beautiful Japanese girl (Hiroko Berghauer) he meets at his new job and has an affair; Christine finds out and throws him out. Thus their problems are very American—money, in-laws, children, and infidelity. What is different is the charmingly Gallic view of married love and romance. The couple are chic; the Japanese other woman is très exotique; even the baby, Alphonse, is adorable. There is no sense that any of the problems cannot be overcome, or that any of it is a terrible tragedy. It’s only marriage, after all.

  Where Bed and Board is a soufflé, Scenes from a Marriage is a blood pudding.54 It’s intense. Shot in long takes and unrelenting close-ups, its goal is to probe and reveal and expose. Can a man and a woman actually keep marital love alive? Scenes’s couple (Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson) are professionals. She’s a divorce lawyer and he’s a scientist (and failed poet). Everyone thinks of them as perfectly wed. In particular, Ullmann is presented as an example of an earth-mother wife, nurturing, parenting, obeying, and directing household tasks and family gatherings with great skill. Josephson seemingly appreciates all this. The story takes hold when Josephson abruptly leaves Ullmann for another woman. She—and everyone else—is forced to confront the truth about their marriage: it wasn’t really working. As years go by, the couple divorce, take other lovers, marry others, and yet they cannot ever really break their bonds of intimacy and connection. They can read each other’s minds, understand each other better than anyone else, and can never forget or lose the original desire that first united them. They share a passion that can emerge as both love and hate, but it’s passion for and about each other. Scenes makes an audience suffer the ups and downs of their relationship, always suggesting that these two people are deeply linked, whether or not we can understand why. In the end, however, despite their Scandinavian doom and gloom, their list of troubles are the familiar ones of American films: children, family, competition, and infidelity.

  Marriage is apparently a universal language. In the French film Bed and Board, Claude Jade (wife) and Jean-Pierre Léaud (husband) ignore each other in bed with their separate books …

  … and in Sweden, Erland Josephson (husband) and Liv Ullmann (wife) more or less do the same in Scenes from a Marriage. (Photo Credit 2.94)

  Ozu’s Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is the story of a childless middle-aged couple living in an “uptown” mansion in Tokyo. Despite the luxury of their home, its spaces, which the camera often sits observing, are empty, soundless, and vibrating with a sense of loneliness. The husband (Shin Saburi) is an executive at an engineering company; the wife (Michiyo Kogure) is traditionally at home in charge of the household. He is a reliable, quiet, and rather taciturn man from the country. She’s snobbish, bored, and believes her husband to be dull. In particular, she’s irritated by his table manners: he’s loud, eats like a peasant, and always pours green tea over his rice. They have, however, survived many years of marriage. In their story, nothing dramatic happens, but that’s part of Ozu’s directorial style, which uses the camera as a patient observer. Green Tea over Rice tells an audience as much about marriage as any movie, but it’s information gleaned only by intensive watching. Minor crises do occur. The wife lies to her husband, pretending to be taking care of a niece while she really escapes to a spa with her friends. There’s strife when the husband’s family instructs the wife to arrange a marriage for that same niece, and the girl, a modern type who always wears Western dress, wants to make her own choice. The final crisis comes when the wife leaves Tokyo on a train trip, going away alone.

  It’s possible, despite their minimalist issues, to classify the couple as having the recognizable American movie pro
blems about marriage: children (lack of), incompatibility (she’s uptown, he’s provincial), relatives (the niece and his family), etc. Although the movie was made sixty years ago in Japan, cultural differences fade. (As David Thomson wrote about Ozu: “The intensive viewing of Ozu—and such stylistic rigor encourages nothing less—makes questions of Japaneseness irrelevant … The intentness of the image, and its emotional resonance, is … as relevant to the West as to Japan.”) Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the two final scenes of Green Tea over Rice, the first depicting the couple and the second indicating the beginning of the niece’s potential marital relationship.

  In the first scene, the husband returns home unexpectedly early from a business trip, having had plane trouble. It’s late at night, and he and his wife go into the kitchen to prepare a simple meal. The wife is somewhat unfamiliar with where things are in the kitchen (they have servants), but the two work together, finding what they need. As they sit down to eat, she tells him she won’t go away again without telling him. They begin their meal, and he pours green tea over his rice. She does the same. Nothing much more needs to be said. It’s an act of marital acceptance. In the unscheduled shared experience of food preparation, their marriage, their reunion, and their future are defined. There is no other filmed or recorded explanation for why they will remain side by side for the rest of their lives. Tradition and habit prevail.

  In the final scene of the film, the husband’s young male friend and the feisty niece are seen walking along the sidewalk. Suddenly, they begin to engage in playful sparring. He tries to embrace her; she runs from him and hides inside a kiosk. He tries to enter; she pushes him out. This action is repeated several times, and then they run off together, away from the camera, away from audience scrutiny. Their conflict—a game of advance and reject—and its repetition unto familiarity and commitment indicate to a sharp observer that these two people have already embraced the basics of marriage.

  All three of these foreign films share a bottom line of recognizable American marriage problems, suggesting that marriage films transcend cultural differences. They also suggest, as most Hollywood movies do, that there is no easy way to explain or understand marriage. Croissants, smorgasbords, or green tea, marriage is just marriage.

  The universality of international movie marriages is brilliantly confirmed by the Iranian A Separation (2011). A film of depth and complexity, A Separation is not only about marriage; it’s also about the clash between modern and traditional customs and attitudes in Iran, about the different ideologies and cultures the nation reflects, and about its political structure. Yet although what an American viewer sees onscreen about Iran may be a world we don’t expect to see, what we see about marriage is what we know and recognize. Modern Iran is urban, traffic-plagued, and a melange of unfamiliar cultures and religious attitudes, but the two marriages depicted have familiar problems: money, incompatibility, in-laws, and children.

  A Separation begins where we’ve been before: a married couple disagrees over something serious. The wife (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran and take their young daughter (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s own daughter) with her, but her husband (Peyman Moadi) wants to remain so he can take care of his elderly father, who suffers from dementia. Since the couple cannot agree on what to do, Hatami moves out, going home to live with her parents. This decision triggers the arrival into their lives of a second married couple. The husband hires a young woman (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father while he goes to work, and allows her to bring her own young daughter to work with her. Moadi doesn’t realize two things: (1) the woman is pregnant; and (2) she has not told her husband that she’s working. Bayat’s husband (Shahab Hosseini) is an unemployed shoemaker, and the couple are deeply in debt. The conjunction of the two marriages leads to disaster.

  Movie marriages cross international borders once again, as in A Separation (from Iran). Married couple Leila Hatami and Peyman Moadi reflect the status of their marriage in body language and the space between their chairs. (Photo Credit 2.95)

  Both marriages are disintegrating and, although at different levels of the social scale, suffer from similar problems: lack of communication, pressure from their families, and financial strictures. Both are at an impasse. Neither husband deals with his spouse honestly (and they are all living within a legal system that places its citizens in a similar position). Both couples quarrel. Neither are fully aware of the intense feelings of their daughters: their fears about the family, and their uncertainty about their own roles in their parents’ problems. Both couples freeze one another out with deadly silences. Both must deal with government bureaucracy on a daily basis. The upper-social-strata wife is a doctor, and the lower is a housemaid; the doctor at first appears to be more liberated, but the maid finds her own ways of defying her husband’s controls. The more educated husband is a bank employee, and in a position to cope with legal issues, and yet the shoemaker is able to bring him into court and get him in trouble. There’s a feeling of unease during the viewing process, as if at any moment something totally unexpected—and awful—can erupt. There is a constant question as to what is true, who is correct, what is the right way to feel, and even what is actually happening. A viewer doesn’t know where to locate sympathy and what to believe. And there lies the film’s complexity: instead of a typical movie picture of marriage, there exists onscreen the mystery of two real marriages. We can easily recognize surface events, familiar from life and other movies, but, as is true of what we know about offscreen unions, we can’t really understand either marriage, and it’s not because the setting is Iran. Marriage in the movies, it seems, is Esperanto only in its problems, not at its core.

  1 Frank Sinatra was a heroin addict in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), and Bing Crosby an alcoholic in The Country Girl (1954). Both men received Oscar nominations for Best Actor. Susan Hayward played an alcoholic in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) and in I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), and was Oscar-nominated for both performances.

  2 Unfaithfully Yours was less successfully remade in 1984 with Dudley Moore.

  3 Marriage movies dare to say out loud what people in the audience might be thinking, but might never say.

  4 Fox Film, the company that made the movie, proudly labeled this technique “narratage” and put up a plaque in a New York theater commemorating “the first motion picture in which narratage was used as a method of telling a dramatic story.” The ad campaign said narratage “embodies the action of the silent picture, the reality of voice, and the searching penetration of the novel.”

  5 A “socialite” was someone who did not necessarily have money herself, but had been raised in the arena of money and knew how to behave—which fork to use and how to write a proper thank-you note. (Lee Radziwill might be the Last of the Socialites.) The term was associated with all the graces, but also with the sense that it was absolutely necessary for such a woman to marry for money. In fact, the occupation of the socialite (and her family, especially the mother) was to find a rich husband to marry before the bills piled too high. The socialite is the high-toned gold digger. Where the gold digger wants only money, and doesn’t know how to act around it, the socialite fits in and is doing the work her family has trained her to do.

  6 The Jones family figured in both a popular film series and a successful radio show. Love on a Budget was the eighth film of the series. In 2009, a bad movie called The Joneses told of a group of individuals hired to live in the suburbs, pretend to be a real family, and stimulate product sales by inspiring consumer jealousy among the neighbors.

  7 The story was told a third time as The Gun Runners in 1958. Directed by Don Siegel, this version starred Audie Murphy, Eddie Albert, and Patricia Owens. This time, the skipper was smuggling guns into Cuba.

  8 The tradition of the beleaguered spouse who has to risk importing aliens was brilliantly varied and updated in 2008’s Frozen River, in which Melissa Leo, a financially pressured single mom, smuggles illegals across the frozen wi
lderness of Canada and into the United States.

  9 Has Anybody Seen My Gal? is a charming little film with Charles Coburn, Lynn Bari, Piper Laurie, and Rock Hudson, but its main claim today is its fleeting glimpse of a young James Dean.

  10 Similarly, Judge Hardy and his family are nearly undone when they inherit an estate and become wrapped up in false values (The Hardys Ride High, 1939). In the movies, too much or too little, money just chews away at marital happiness.

  11 Most of these movies are screwball comedies, and not necessarily about marriage.

  12 People disagree on whether or not the couple actually ever make love. It’s clear they don’t have sex in his friend’s apartment, but what happened when they were alone in the boathouse?

  13 The popularity of the story held true: Too Many Husbands was remade as a musical in 1955 called Three for the Show, starring Betty Grable, and My Favorite Wife was remade in 1963 as Move Over, Darling. It was originally meant to be called Something’s Gotta Give and to star Marilyn Monroe, but illness required her to be replaced by Doris Day. Three for the Show updates the dreary Too Many Husbands very cleverly. There’s more comedy, and less talk about the problem. Grable figures things out more quickly than Jean Arthur: “I’ve got what every woman wants—a husband and a love—and they’re both legal.” She imagines herself as an exotic woman with a fully stocked male harem. All the men are in cages with labels as to their particular day of the week, and she feeds them lovingly as she sings, “Down, Boy!”

  14 So much for Ninotchka’s 1939 tagline, which advertised “Garbo Laughs!” as if it were happening onscreen for the first time.