I Think I Love My Wife
It's nearly two, and I've just come back from breakfast across the street, where we watched stragglers from the St Patrick's Day parade drift down 86th Street. The parade terminates at Lexington Avenue these days, not Second, so we're spared most of the drunks and detritus, not to mention the motor coaches and traffic barriers. Kathleen will give me an eyewitness account of the moraine when she gets to the office. When we parted after breakfast, she headed for the bank and the subway, right in the thick of things.
Ordinarily, I'd be dusting and vacuuming and listening to one of Bach's Passions, but I'm feeling sheepish about not having seen the Eric Rohmer film, L'amour l'après-midi, known here as Chloe in the Afternoon. The movie that I saw yesterday, Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife, is said to be a remake. I don't know why I've seen none of Mr Rohmer's films aside from L'anglaise et le duc, but I've not always been as enthusiastic about French movies as I am now. In any case, that's what I'm about to do - see L'amour l'après-midi.
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Watching L'amour l'après-midi, a grave, talky, but extremely interior film, I wondered how it had ever held the interest of a brash American comedian, much less inspired him to remake it as a comedy. And what a fascinating remake I Love My Wife is! If you set aside the interpolations that make it funny, the newer picture is remarkably faithful to the original in terms of scenes, sequence, visual details, and, not least of all, dénouement. But the result of this fidelity is to emphasize the vast difference between the respective protagonists' romantic adventures, as well as the gulf between French cinematic sensibility thirty-five years ago and its American counterpart today.
Another puzzle: what would I have thought of L'amour l'après-midi if I hadn't seen I Think I Love My Wife?
