17/10/2022 - We take a look at Latvian director Signe Baumane's autobiographical feature-length animation which took part in Animest's competition

It took seven years and a combination of crowdfunding and grants from cultural NGOs to bring to life Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane’s movie My Love Affair with Marriage [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Signe Baumane
film profile], which was screened at Animest as part of the Feature Film Competition. Like most of Baumane’s works, including the critically acclaimed debut feature Rocks in my Pockets (2014), the movie is a loosely autobiographical story. It’s also a musical, a witty medical report, an anecdotal take on Eastern Europe’s recent history, and a timely political statement.

Our protagonist is Zelma, a Latvian girl who has been taught, from the earliest days of childhood, that being a woman is about finding a husband, and, more generally, being obedient. Even as she tries to break free, this upbringing implicitly shapes Zelma’s decisions and emotional states. We see this throughout different stages of her life, starting with her elementary school years in Riga where she struggles to make friends because of her outspoken personality, continuing into her early adulthood in Moscow, where she establishes herself as a visual artist and has to cope with an abusive marriage, and ending with middle-age in Toronto, where she rediscovers her faith in love, only to lose it again.

To reduce My Love Affair with Marriage to its plot, however, would be to understate its rich narrative structure, for Baumane works on no fewer than four levels which intertwine dialectically across chapters mapping the feminist coming-of-age arc. There’s the objective level, depicting the protagonist’s main life events and encounters, and then there’s the subjective one, channelled through Zelma’s earnest voice-over, which allows us into her thoughts and feelings vis-à-vis these events, and earns our empathy. Next, there’s the social and political level, in the form of a Greek choir composed of village women, whose operatically staged musical singing preaches the dogmatic understanding of womanhood which informs Zelma’s cultural tendencies. Finally, there’s the scientific level, featuring humorous drawings and verbal explanations, which show that even supposedly metaphysical feelings such as love, attachment and dependency, are always a matter of neurochemistry, too.

This narrative blend is complemented by spectacular stylistic diversity. Baumane jumps effortlessly from 2D to stop-motion animation, from puppet-like characters with big noses and round eyes to models of oxytocin and serotonin compounds floating in abstract space. The movie’s life-like settings are occasionally abandoned in favour of exuberant bursts of visual and conceptual fantasy, just as the film’s realistic continuity editing is strategically switched for jumpier sequences. Ultimately, it all comes together to offer an emotionally engaging personal journey in terms of content, and an intellectually compelling artistic object in terms of craft.

The only segment which feels somewhat underdeveloped is the story’s conclusion. Given the film’s masterfully constructed character arc, it might have benefited from a less abrupt ending, one which might also have explored the aftermath of the protagonist finally finding freedom and self-confidence. It would no doubt be based on what we see in the last sequence, but an explicit albeit short “emancipation” chapter would have proved a rightful narrative reward for Zelma’s struggles and the viewer’s engagement.