Sep 12

Sep 12 TIFF 2021 film review: 'The Story of My Wife'

No film needs nearly three hours to lay out why an impulsive wedding made on a dare would somehow result in a struggling marriage - yet the tedious and arduous drama 'The Story of My Wife' (screening during the 46th Toronto International Film Festival) takes far too long to arrive to an all-too obvious conclusion.

In short: Freighter ship captain Jacob Störr (Gijs Naber) makes a bet in a café with a friend, to marry the first woman who enters the building - which is when Lizzy (Léa Seydoux) enters the room.

"I'll be back in four months" is a patently absurd sentence to hear any husband tell his bride, especially the morning after their wedding. The concept of marriages of convenience isn't itself a problem. It’s certainly a worthwhile theme to explore - but Jacob literally just marries the first woman to walk into a room ... because some ship cook tells him marriage will solve his tummy ache. He outright declares that he won't care if his sham wife cheats on him while he's away for months at a time - just so long as his tummy doesn't ache anymore. So - shocker of all shockers - the story told in seven chapters doesn't make it two entire chapters before Jacob becomes suspicious of her infidelity.

The fact that 'Story' is almost exclusively told through Jacob's perspective becomes a fundamental problem for the one-sided film. Lizzy is barely a character through the first several chapters - she's merely Jacob's sociable and attractive wife. She's a woman who caught Jacob's eye - and she catches the eye of other men. For his part, Jacob isn't exactly a multi-faceted, layered protagonist, but at least 'Story' takes the time to show his monotonous existence at sea. After a hasty wedding, ‘Story’ just gets bogged down by a "is she or isn’t she cheating” undercurrent that’s without tension. And because the film is told from Jacob’s perspective, it’s empathetic to the sea captain who recklessly married a woman he just met - and treats Lizzy as little more than a prop in his marriage experiment.

Even if 'Story' was pared down by an hour or more, the bloated script takes entirely too long to arrive at the not-remotely-surprising conclusion that marriages of convenience are little more than mutually beneficial partnerships. Frustratingly, in fleeting moments 'Story' hints at a masculine disregard for wives. Jacob asks his ship's cook how he manages life as a husband and father while away from his wife and daughters for months at a time - to which the cook callously discounts their isolated life, noting that's "their problem." This is as close as 'Story' ever gets to saying anything particularly interesting about inequity in marriage and relationships. He's amused by his flirtations - but his hypocrisy lends itself to his constant suspicious of his wife - how she spends her days and with whom she keeps company. But it honestly gets tiring after he questions her fidelity for the umpteenth time.

The pointless and arduous nearly three-hour runtime draws out an entirely predictable plot that has few surprising emotional twists - resulting in a film that offers little that’s revelatory about love or marriage. Co-leads Seydoux and Naber are fine in their roles - but their characters aren't very dynamic and their character arcs are virtually nonexistent. And for a film set in the early 20th century, 'Story' is a beautifully looking period film. There are certainly worse executed films and even films with less to say - but 'The Story of My Wife' asks a lot of its audience: to endure a story that goes around in circles for entirely too long.

Final verdict: Although beautifully produced and featuring some fine performances, it's difficult to suggest anyone subject themselves to a joyless film that arrives at its thesis in the first act ... and just trudges along a meandering path toward its obvious conclusion.