My First Wife is an excruciatingly emotional film about the break-up of a marriage in contemporary Australia. There's not much new in it, and the dialogue isn't especially brilliant, but it's exceeding well done and sharply observant. Director and co-author Paul Cox based the story partly on events in his own life, and it shows. I feel a little cool about the film, as it delves into extremely intimate feelings with a mix of openness and artlessness that I find at times offputting. There are things that we are told about the husband that it might be better not to know, or to have told differently. The cast, led by John Hargreaves and Wendy Hughes, is flawless. Like so many films from Australia and Great Britain over the last twenty years, My First Wife has about it an undercurrent of pessimism that goes beyond its putative subject matter, as if the real subject was the Anglo-Saxon world in general, and its imminent demise, which, as is suggested in this film, richly deserved.
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telegonus21 November 2002
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film-18130 December 2005Excruciatingly painful to watch, but that, amongst other things, is what this medium's about. At the end the couple have achieved some kind of resolution but in the process of watching this we are exposed to the most realistic portrayal of a marriage break-up that I have ever seen on celluloid. The performances, particularly from the protagonists - John Hargreaves and Wendy Hughes - are superb. There's an honesty about this movie which allows for an acknowledgement of doubt, anger, shame and a whole host of confused, tangled, ambivalent emotions not generally seen in movies. Since first seeing it about 10 years ago I've occasionally gone to amazon looking to find it again. Shame it's not available on DVD.