... it's quite hard to tell.
Anyway, as the title indicates and the poster illustrates, "Seven Years of Marriage" is about a crisis within a couple, Alain (Didier Bourdon) and Audrey (Catherine Frot) whose lives have sunk in boredom and monotony, and sexual dissatisfaction seems to be the cause. Well, I'm only married for four years (and we have a daughter too) and I'm not sure everything is a matter of sexuality, but it's true it does help a lot when things go bad, and when they don't, it makes them worse.
The film starts quite well, with a promising exposition of a rather ordinary middle-aged bourgeois couple with so typical professions: Alain is a doctor and Audrey a banker, they are very well-educated and well-balanced people, but only on the surface, once you scratch a little, you find melancholy and sadness. And the tragedy of most couples is that they only allow their hearts to speak during arguments, if a wife and a husband dared to speak a little bit about their fears and insecurities before the storm, they would learn to avoid them. It's a simple matter of communication, a way to reach the other.
But we can hardly communicate because a couple speaks two languages and sometimes works in autopilot mode, we pretend to care, to listen to one another and time pass by. There are some hits of genius in the film with the husbands secretly watching pornography or flirting with pretty girls, it's not the typical mid-life crisis, Didier isn't in quest of new personal thrills, just the assertion that his sex-appeal still works, he 's looking for it as sheer escapism from a poisoning condition. It's not until a friend of him, a doctor, played by Jacques Veber, shows the salvation: transferring this world of sexual profusion in his boring domestic life, making a pornography film out of marriage.
At this point, it works as the film starts like a French version of "American Beauty" with a little something slightly reminding of "Scenes From a Marriage". It even introduces us to Audrey's perspective, she's restrained, very straight-laced, but not that narrow-minded as her husband believes. For instance, when her (embittered) friends calls a woman a slut because she's wearing a thong in the swimming pool, Audrey is rather serene about it, such a good woman can afford it. Right after, the friend shouts at kids who were staring at her under the pool, incarnating a certain attitude toward sex-appeal resembling the sour grapes effect. Surprisingly, Audrey isn't sour, she's not confident either, only confident that she has no reason to feel so when it comes to her body.
It's all a matter of confidence, and this is where the film derails from the intelligence initially displayed. It becomes a matter of 'performance', it's all about going as far as possible in terms of sex, overcoming the curiosity and trying everything for the sake of trial, swingers' party, accessories, even threesomes. These were obligatory subjects to exploit but it occupies too much of the film that it becomes redundant, if not unrealistic, the presence of a transvestite brother was already a signal (he could have been just gay and give an interesting insight on similar couple issues within homosexual couples). The film makes it a running-gag that sex is everywhere, and all you have to do is pull an "American Beauty" and look closer, everywhere.
It's a point of view after all, maybe sex, like money, drives the whole society, it's even truer now with the profusion of pornography and Internet, there are websites where couples, average looking can submit pictures and videos, it's called cuckolding and some husbands get their kicks by having a desirable wife. In societies, where modernity prevented people from dying of hunger, sex will be the only available pleasure. This prospect, within the framework of marital life, seems encouraging, but in a way, sounds the death knell for marriage as it becomes impossible to commit oneself to the idea of one body when there's so much to discover. The film ends in a positive guys with guys peeping at Audrey's legs and Alain's smile indicates that he was turned on by his wife's effect on men, there's a thin line between that a cuckolding.
But it's no holds barred, and the film has one merit, to stick to that issue and provide the interesting twist that the doctor has in fact the most miserable sexual life of all. It's just that after one hour, the film is already in its resolution and doesn't offer much except the possibility reconsider a few limits within these evolutions. It also provides the fraudulent idea that the couple's stability rely on this sexual complicity. "Seven years of Marriage" works on a bed level, but it provides such an interesting gallery of talented and serious actors that it could have been more audacious in its exploration of marital problems. I'm sure there was more than sex in it.
It's rather thin, but sex itself isn't a subject that offers much to explore without drowning the story into an exploration of all the sexual fantasies.
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