Review: My Love Affair With Marriage

Coming-of-age animated movies are all of the rage right now and are usually favoring women at the moment. The genre is well-represented on both sides in live-action, but in animation, women coming-of-age stories are far more prevalent than men’s. Signe Baumane’s animated musical My Love Affair With Marriage is an autobiographical tale about Baumane’s bouts with love.

Signe opts for the name “Zelma” in this adaptation about her life portrayed by Dagmara Dominczyk. It’s here we learn all about Zelma’s upbringings in Moscow during the fall of communism which, to be honest, doesn’t come off that dissimilar to most upbringings depicted in the west. In the film, Zelma learns about her body and eventually is married a few times before finally realizing that she’s better off alone and not everybody is meant to find their forever someone and instead she should focus on her forever something, thereby bucking the trend of years of conservative socialism and instead just being the best ‘self’ one can be.

During the course of the two-hour(!!) run-time, we get a tale largely narrated by “Biology” voiced by Michele Pawk. Biology acts as our guide that scientifically examines men and women at their primal levels and does so with extensive comic relief. As we continue through our journey, Zelma’s run-ins with her three lovers, Jonas (Stephen Lang), Bo (Matthew Modine) and Sergei (Cameron Monaghan) and of the three I actually thought Bo was the most miscast mainly because of me trying to reconcile Matthew’s mid-sixties voice with that of a Swedish dude who, at best, was mid-to-late thirties. Granted I understand that Matthew is of Swedish ancestry and is a producer on the movie, but trying to pair him with a character thirty-years is junior was as much of a stretch as you’re gonna get.

The animation production is where this film really shines with papier-mâché juxtaposed amongst 2D hand-drawn  and 3D techniques that also used different types of programs like Photoshop (especially in the biology scenes), After Effects, and even some OpenStreetMap that helps us during our constant globe-trotting sequences. Even with the film deploying multiple film studios from across the world, nothing seems out-of-place and the different settings help make for entertaining plot points.

Overall, My Love Affair With Marriage’s take on “a woman” is not unlike the same sort of ordeal that you would see in the likes of Netflix’s Big Mouth and a number of other animated examples like My Year of Dicks and personally I liked more learning about “the woman” at the center of the film’s subject matter, the upbringings during such rich historical context as the backdrop was much more interesting, even with the aforementioned miscasts.

My Love Affair With Marriage is available now wherever films are sold.