A married woman takes a lover, but can Joreth take yet another affair movie?
It's so much worse when they manage to get you to like a movie before they turn it to shit.
No, you're not experiencing deja vu. I said that exact same line when I reviewed Paint Your Wagon. It's still true.
5 to 7 was a Netflix recommendation, so naturally I went into it expecting it to be a total shitstorm. Instead, I found it charming. The Netflix summary says: "an aspiring young novelist finds his conservative beliefs about love and relationships tested when a chance encounter outside a New York City hotel leads to an intense affair with a French diplomat's beautiful wife."
Everything about this descriptions says this movie should be terrible. The main character is said to be conservative and I can't get into movies unless I can connect to the characters. An "affair" implies a secret, and the qualifier "intense" leads one to imagine this is some sort of dark romantic thriller.
It was nothing like that. This was more like a romantic comedy, but surprisingly without any artificial conflict between the two lovers.
Brian is very young (to my ancient, middle-aged eyes), a 24-year old would-be writer living in New York. Walking down the street, he sees a beautiful woman smoking outside of a hotel. He crosses the street and manufactures a reason to start talking to her. She seems antagonistic to his overtures but invites him to meet her again at the same time and place next week.
So he does.
His appearance at the appointed time surprises her and she invites him to spend a couple of hours with her at a museum between 5 and 7 the following Monday. He agrees to that too. So they spend the time wandering around the museum, and later the park, getting to know each other. I still feel that she is sending him prickly signals, but apparently she is just being French.
Towards the end of their date, Ariel (as she is named) casually announces that she is married with 2 children and nearly a decade older than Brian. He is taken aback by this information and she responds as if confused that he would have a problem with it. She goes on to explain that she and her husband have an open marriage with very specific rules and it's all very normal and acceptable in her culture, and implies that Brian is a naive, uncultured, close-minded American and thinks his "conservative" monogamous beliefs are the weird ones.
Brian is unable to accept that consent is the element that makes something ethical or unethical not an arbitrary adherence to someone else's structure, and says he can't see her. Ariel says that Brian knows where she will be every Friday afternoon if he should change his mind. 3 weeks later, he does. So she gives him a hotel room key and says to meet her there at 5.
Apparently, according to Ariel, "5 to 7" is French slang for "open relationship", at least, of a particular type of open relationship. She says that it used to be literal - that it was a reasonable time of the day for a spouse's whereabouts to be ... fuzzy and unknown, so that's when people looked the other way while their spouses visited their affairs. Eventually, it morphed into a saying, something like a "5 to 7 relationship" that meant a primary marriage with side partners. But Ariel and her husband Valerie found the literal time to be convenient for their lifestyle so they keep with tradition. This makes her an "old-fashioned girl".
The bulk of the movie is vignettes of Brian and Ariel spending time together and we see their feelings for each other grow. We learn that Valerie has a mistress of his own and the two women know each other, and everyone in the equation feels content with the arrangement, except Brian. Even their kids are cool with things and at one point tell Brian that they're glad he's mummy's boyfriend and they welcome him to the family (which throws him for a loop because he didn't realize the kids knew).
So, at this point, I thought the movie was cute and all the non-monogamous people seemed well-adjusted and content, and I was willing to overlook the whole couple-privilege thing because everyone seemed to be happy with things, and the stuff that bothered Brian was less about the couple privilege and more about the very notion of non-monogamy. I got the impression that if they had more of a commune-style or network style relationship, he still would have been uncomfortable.
Until it became about couple-privilege. As it always does, because that's what happens with privilege. And with rules.
I have always said that if everyone just wanted to follow a rule, then a rule is not necessary. And if someone did not want to follow a rule, then a rule would not stop them.
Throughout the movie, we learn about Ariel's and Valerie's rules, which are very much designed to protect their privileged status as an upper class monogamous couple. And that kept bothering me. It would be one thing if Ariel said "as a mother and wife of a diplomat, my schedule is very full. I have blocked off the hours of 5-7 for 'me time', which allows me the freedom to pursue relationships like this, but I have very many other things in my life that I value and this is all the time I am willing to spare right now." I might have wrinkled my nose a little bit, but honestly, my life isn't much more available.
But instead, she said that she and her husband had a *rule*. They "agreed" on this thing, and this was what it was. The feelings of the new partner did not matter, and, in fact, the feelings of Ariel or Valerie did not matter. What mattered is that the rule was followed.
And people only follow the rules when they want to, until they don't, when they stop.
As his feelings for Ariel grow, seeing her only from 5-7 on certain days is not enough for him. He wins an award for his writing and this is a very important moment in his life. Naturally, he wants to share it with the important people in his life. Ariel is not allowed to see him romantically outside of 5-7, but she is allowed to attend public functions with her husband while refusing to acknowledge her side relationships in public. Honestly, that would piss me off too. I'd rather someone stayed home than show up to something important in my life and pretend that we're mere acquaintances.
She argues with him that rules are rules. I would argue that the rules did not always exist. At one time, they were negotiated. Now is a time for a renegotiation.
So now, the conclusion of the film, because, as usual, it's the conclusion of the film that makes or breaks it for me in terms of whether or not something is to be classified as 'poly-ish".
SPOILERS:
Brian falls deeply in love with Ariel and asks her to marry him and allow him to be a stepfather to her children. Ariel's first reaction is anger that he has betrayed her by "breaking" their agreements. But her next reaction is to decide to divorce her husband and run away with Brian.
I literally facepalmed here.
This movie had the opportunity for some real personal growth for all the characters. This is the pivot point of the film - the part that determines the future. This one scene decides what happens to the characters for the rest of their lives.
This point was a chance for Ariel and Valerie to examine their couple privilege, to really look at their arrangement and question if it was truly fair, truly *ethical* how they were treating their side partners. Is it really fair for anyone to place limitations on people's emotions? On their futures? On the structure of a relationship? To insist that people serve a relationship rather than a relationship serving the needs of the people in it?
This was a moment where Ariel and Valerie could have taken a good look at the privileges they enjoy for pretending to participate in the mainstream culture while stepping outside of it at their whim but not in any way that inconveniences them while massively inconveniencing their partners.
And at the same time, Brian could have had the opportunity to keep chipping away at his biases and his insecurities and his narrow exposure to other cultures and other beliefs. Brian could have really stretched his comfort zone by challenging himself to see Valerie as family, the way Valerie professed to see him (of course, he didn't really, as addressed in the previous bit about couple privilege, but that could have been his own growth opportunity).
What was never even considered by literally anyone in the entire film was Ariel having two husbands. What if Brian could have become a part of their household? What if Valerie's girlfriend, Jane, could have had the potential to join, instead of merely accepting that this was always destined to be a short-term, time-filling, relationship? What if the children, who had grown attached to Brian, could have had a stay-at-home dad along with a socially active mom and a breadwinning father? And maybe another bread-winning mother? What if Valerie and Ariel had to learn that other people mattered and they couldn't always have things their way all the time?
What if everyone had stopped paying lip-service to the term "family" and actually built one?
In the end, many years have gone by and we see that all is as it should be - Brian finds a nice monogamous woman to settle down with and have children with, Jane gets her own husband, and Ariel and Valerie are the same old happy family-of-four that they've always been, polite, civilized, and appropriate. Brian and Ariel have now managed to romanticize their past relationship because it didn't last long enough for them to get out of the NRE stage and see each other as full people with flaws and quirks and gross little habits that they hate, and so live on in each other's memories as "perfect".
Instead of recognizing that it's possible to love more than one person at a time.
Oh, and one more thing, during Brian and Ariel's breakup, we learn that Ariel was apparently never in love with her husband and that she has only known Twu Wove with Brian - a man barely into adulthood who doesn't seem to understand her at all and with whom she only knew for a short time. It's not clear how long, but the children don't seem to have aged at all during their relationship. This comes out of left field. There is absolutely no indication anywhere in the film up to this point that Ariel's and Valerie's marriage is anything other than perfect and exactly what they both want.
And I really hate it when writers do this to non-monogamous couples. People who are written and portrayed as happy together suddenly, without warning or lead-up, reveal that their whole relationship is a sham and everything is a lie. People who are happy together do not make the sorts of decisions that the writers need these people to make, so they invent a conflict that nobody ever saw until that conflict was necessary to drive the two people apart.
I have been in those relationships where I was open and honest with my partner about having other partners and being polyamorous, and after a while, they begged me to go monogamous with them. Those breakup conversations are all the same. They always included a moment where I had to say something like "what part of this didn't you understand?!"
And, knowing what I know about how the brain works and what happens to our memories, I fully believe that this weird sort of "we were totally happy together and then she let me think it could be just the two of us, but then she chose him over me for no good reason!" disjointed story is what many of those exes remember of our time together. I would be completely unsurprised to learn that they felt my responses to our relationship made about as much sense as these sorts of characters in movies do, like Ariel and like Mason and Samantha in Fling.
But being the person that other people think makes "out of character" decisions, I just think that those who write their characters to make out of character choices don't really understand their characters very well. So we end up with a woman whose life is happy and perfect and exactly the way she wants it to be, until she decides to throw it all away to live monogamously with some kid she hardly knows, except she then chooses "duty" and "family honor" to stay with a man she never really loved to begin with.
I have a lot to say about the dysfunction of their relationship with their couplehood and their rules and their devaluing of their other partners, but her actions and decisions here made no sense. Each time she flip-flopped, it was totally contrary to everything we knew of her character up until that point.
But at the same time, when you think you can legislate feelings, you are in for a surprise when those feelings jump up and do something unexpected to challenge that legislation. And this is why making rules like this is bad.
Sure, the original family group remained intact. That's the goal for most of these rule-makers and their rules - protect the family at all costs. So, by that standard you could say the rules and their relationship as structured were successful. But that price tag... Neither of the main characters are with the people they believe that they truly love.
And when there was an alternative that would not have "destroyed the family" that was never even considered...
I had thought of adding this to the list under the criteria for "if the movie shows positive and/or realistic scenarios of poly issues & situations, such as coming-out conversations, dealing with discrimination, overcoming jealousy, reaching out to metamours, etc." because "other criteria" also allow for a movie's inclusion if the relationship ends and Ariel had some good defenses to Brian's reaction of her marriage. But for a movie to be included even when the relationship ends, it has to end "due to outside pressure or personality conflicts, but seems to be an otherwise functional and happy relationship and it was not the polyamory that caused the breakup". And, in this case, I feel that the primary plot relationship ended because of the open nature of the relationship.
Brian could not accept a non-monogamous relationship. I have no problem with him having a problem with the time restrictions and not allowing their relationship to grow into a more traditional-marriage-like arrangement. But he wanted a *monogamous* marriage with her. It never occurred to either of them to have a live-in Vee, or even an N with Valerie's mistress.
When Ariel accepted Brian's proposal, she also wanted monogamy. But then when she changed her mind and chose to stay with her husband, she did not even think to offer a compromise of having two husbands. She broke up with Brian because he wanted something different than what she originally offered and she would not compromise or consider alternatives.
The open relationship is what broke them up. She chose her life with her husband, and she ended her relationship with Brian. She did not offer to keep what they always had and nobody considered any alternatives. She chose her husband over Brian. And "the movie makes any character choose one partner over another, and especially if it implies that choosing one makes the protagonist happy in spite of the jilted lover being a decent partner" is one of the "does not make the list" criteria. Also, "the movie seems to be written with a tone that implies that open relationships cannot work," it does NOT go on the list, i.e. the poly characters' decisions only make sense in the context of a writer who doesn't understand polyamory.
So, with that, I will not include this on the polyish movie list, in spite of there being some reasonable defenses of their lifestyle in the early conversations between Ariel and Brian. I also left out a whole bunch of details, if anyone still wants to see the film. It was charming, for me, right up until the end.
polyamory; polyamorous; poly; polya; polyam; poly-ish; nonmonogamy; non-monogamy; ethical non-monogamy; consensual non-monogamy; ENM; CNM; open marriage; open relationship; hierarchy; hierarchical; couple privilege; love triangle; vee; relationship; polycule; couple; rbamp; movie review