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Cinematic Critiques of Marriage
On the long path to women’s liberation in films directed by men
Like other domains of popular culture, cinema mirrors the dreams and fears of the society in which it is born. It is often also in film that experiments in sex and love are acted out that appear too risky for many to implement in their everyday lives.
What can cinema teach us about society’s understanding of marriage, monogamy, and its alternatives? One way to answer this question is by examining a range of films produced by men which depict couples in relatively traditional heterosexual relationships, yet in which these relationships are beginning to come undone.
Why might one want to do that, you might ask? Surely men have dominated the narrative for far too long. What is the point of viewing marriage, sex, and love through the eyes of men, whose worldviews are firmly embedded within a patriarchal system?
The first answer to that question is that the perspectives of men and women are not mutually exclusive. Spending time with male-directed cinema does not prevent us from engaging with feminist cinema or cinema or through the eyes of trans and non-cis-gendered communities. Elsewhere, I have examined the contributions of women and non-binary directors to Palestinian and Georgian cinema.
