I DO… UNTIL I DON’T is a comedy centered on a documentary filmmaker following the lives of three couples attempting to revive their marriages. One of the most radical idea the movie proposes is a partnership “contract” where marriage is not for life, but for a fixed number of years, and subject to negotiation.
Director Lake Bell spoke to the LA Times about the inspiration for the movie, and how she’s not as cynical about marriage as she may seem, “The first time that I thought about writing a story about marriage was when I read an article about a German politician called Gabriele Pauli, this cool, renegade German politician who presented to her government that marriage should be a seven-year contract with an option to renew. And I thought that’s kind of amazing because if you knew that you were only going for seven years, then everybody would probably be on their best behavior. And by the time you end up at the end of seven years, you would probably like each other a lot more and maybe make the choice to stick together for seven [more] years.
Or it could mean you go your separate ways and get remarried to someone else and that would be good for the economy. You’d have multiple marriages and then there would be less lawyer fees, less headaches, maybe people would walk their separate ways in peace. But my true self is sort of, like, ‘Yeah, but that’s still the bailing concept.’ I think the seven-year contract is a fantastical concept which isn’t a reality.”
