'The Story of My Wife': Léa Seydoux Hypnotic Performance Prevents Ildikó Enyedi's Drama From Fully Falling Into Tedium [Cannes Review]

A man asks the first woman who enters the room to marry him and then is surprised to find she does not respect him. This sums up “The Story of My Wife” from Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi, playing in Competition at this year’s Festival de Cannes. It might seem like an unfairly reductive interpretation of an almost three-hour-long film from a respected arthouse director, who won the Camera d’Or for her film “My Twentieth Century” in 1989 in Cannes and more recently the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2017 for “On Body and Soul.” But so little is done with the emotions running through this husband across the years that the ups and downs of his torturous marriage merely register as repetitive blips on a fairly unchanging screen.

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Adapted from the 1942 novel “The Story of My Wife: The Reminiscences of Captain Storr” from Hungarian writer Milán Füst, Enyedi’s film does have the soothingly logical and didactic progression of the bildungsroman, also found most recently in Pietro Marcello’s “Martin Eden,” based on Jack London’s novel. However, that latter film worked hard to make its hero’s learning odyssey as dynamic and felt as possible; it also probably helped that its titular protagonist was a much more driven man than Enyedi’s film. In 1920s Europe, Jakob Störr (Gijs Naber) is a Dutch sea captain who looks the part and has often demonstrated his bravery at sea. But while his crew of young and strong sailors with glistening bodies are portrayed stereotypically as men generally alive to their senses, Jakob is more sensitive and prefers to stay in his cabin having a nice meal while his men drink and dance together. His reason for getting a wife isn’t to do with any desire to settle down after years spent chasing different women in every port. He decides to get married because, according to his cook, this will cure his stomach ache. A curious idea, however much less odd than the suggestion of Kodor (Sergio Rubini), another friend he meets in Paris, who dares him to propose to the first woman that enters the cafe they’re in.

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There is something mischievous about this scenario, a quality which, of course, goes over the head of the dull and straightforward Jakob (the film is divided into chapters, and this one is called “On rational problem solving”), but it also seems to escape Enyedi. The film is, in fact, so attached to its protagonist’s perspective that it conveys its plot in the same rational way as he perceives it, losing a layer of irony and mischief that would have been very welcome to enliven the whole lengthy saga.

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Thankfully, Léa Seydoux’s hypnotic performance helps keep the film from sinking too fast into utter boredom. The French actress puts her enigmatic gaze to great use as Lizzy, an eternally elusive woman to her husband but one that others understand to be cunning and pragmatic to the extreme. While the two engage in a repetitive push and pull of love and hate, one’s mind may very well drift towards wondering the actual reasons why she would put her husband through such an ordeal of lies and infidelity. The obvious answer is far less mysterious than Jakob seems to believe: Lizzy does not love him, and why would she, when he asked to marry her without knowing anything about her? The film did not absolutely have to show us her side of the story, but its total lack of interest in her real motivations makes her seem like little more than an evil temptress, and worst of all, deprive it of any real tension.

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There is a certain progression to Jakob’s failed and humiliating sentimental education, and it is relatively entertaining to see the various methods he tries to become less anxious about his wife’s infidelity. But his realizations about how to maintain a woman’s interest and respect are rather too banal to justify such a long runtime, by the end of which it is hard to feel anything but mild irritation at his humiliating tale of essentially self-inflicted heartbreak. [C]

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