A series of sketches of married life over four decades, starting in 1971 when Sarah, a doctoral student in classics, met the writer Victor Adelman. Sex, happiness, children, cowardice, binge drinking, deception, betrayal, secrets, fights, separation, return home, divorce - the life of Mr. & Mrs. Adelman as a couple has not been a smooth one.
Choosing to tell four decades of the life of a man and a woman, how ambitious for a first film! It sure was a risky move for Nicolas Bedos. But from the very first minutes of the film, you realize that the challenge will be met. The fledgling director has indeed the gift to reconstitute with accuracy the times gone through while proving able to make his characters age with naturalness. He also succeeds, with the complicity of his companion Dora Tillier, in making endearing a rather failed love story, ravaged by the exacerbated cynicism of Victor, a champagne socialist. Perhaps because everything is seen through the eyes of Sarah, clearly less neurotic than her companion.
Written in an energetic language, in which all the words bite home, "Mr. & Mrs. Adelman" shakes the spectator, pushes him in his tracks, while arousing in him a certain melancholy, born from witnessing the failure of a couple that had everything to succeed, both physically and intellectually.
If the fiction couple works only intermittently, it is not the case of the duo Nicolas Bedos & Dora Tillier, whose alchemy is perfect. A good point also to Pierre Arditi as an upper-class jerk: the way he throws his lines in the scene of the meal is great art.
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