The One I Love
If I had known that this movie would stop my blogging spree for months, I may not have watched it. Honestly, I always have an incredibly hard time writing about relationship movies, and the biggest backlog accumulators are always these titles I have personal mixed feelings about (“Secretary” was one of those.)
To be fair to the film though, a lot has happened in the meantime: A missed trip to Paris, a trip to the US, several illnesses (colds and such) and a somewhat bumpy start into the new year. I can’t believe the last time I actually blogged about a movie was in November. Damn.
In theory, the premise of “The one I love” is pretty awesome and it really makes for an interesting story. It’s these kinds of special situations that unveil your deepest true nature and that reminds me a little of an anime series we are currently watching, Death Parade: Take some sort of game or unusual setting, throw a bunch of people in there (typically a couple) and watch what they do. It’s so simple yet so effective. When it comes to “The one I love”, there is also some sci-fi blabla around it, but let’s just suspend disbelief here, because the true interest of the story lies in 1. what the characters actually felt and how they acted and 2. whether the dude ended up leaving the place with the real or the “wrong” Sophie. I like to believe that the movie ended up with the guy actually changing his real wife with this slightly rushed meaningful monologue of his, but in this case, I actually think that it’s supposed to be very open-ended. (In fact, I admit that I spent perhaps 1-2 hours perusing the internet for discussions and theories on the film, when I could have used that to write this blog posting hahaha.)
With that said, I was dissatisfied with how unbalanced this couple was. The wife was clearly the shitty one, whereas the husband never even considered going for the other woman. Elizabeth Moss’s great performance saved that Sophie character a little, but overall she just pissed me off throughout most of the film; heck I couldn’t even understand her whatsoever, which – to me – is a failure of the writing because these kinds of chamber pieces survive on the realism of its characters. One could argue that it’s common for relationships to be so unbalanced, that a total asshole could be dating the sweetest girl in the world, but in this particular context, I think it would make more sense for both characters to be somewhat at fault. Sure, Ethan also spied on Sophie and got crazy jealous, but hey he had every reason to be and from my view, he’s like 10% at fault while she should take up 90% of the blame. Better stories on a crumbling relationship typically maintain this balance mostly (like in “Viaggio in Italia”) and I wish “The one I love” at least had better characters to make up for it.
Nevertheless, despite my personal irks with the Sophie character, I think that the film is an interesting thought exercise on our relationships and how saving a relationship is probably mostly about taking a step down from your idealized version of the other person while trying to improve yourselves together.