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| Images courtesy of MVD Visual |
Latvian born New York based animator, artist, illustrator
and writer Signe Baumane has been working in provocative adult oriented animated
short films since the early 1990s, starting with The Witch and the Cow in
1991 before delivering her final (as of late) short in 2009 with Birth. The first feature effort directed, written,
produced by and starring Signe Baumane Rocks in My Pockets in 2014,
ushered in a new kind of Eastern European animation not seen since Marjane
Satrapi’s adult adaptation of her graphic novel Persepolis in 2007 with
an embittered outlook on life reminiscent of the work of Don Hertzfeld. While her first film touched on her own
dealings with depression and suicide in her family, what would ultimately
become her next feature My Love Affair with Marriage actually initially
began gestating in 2015.
Conceived as a musical with songs composed by Kristian
Sensini with lyrics written by Baumane, the film follows young Soviet Latvian
woman Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk) through her checkered and difficult upbringing
up to the ripe young age of 23 years old as she begins looking for love and marriage
in order to feel complete and whole.
Under constant pressure from Mythology Sirens including a World of
Tomorrow incarnation known only as Biology (Michele Pawk), the film leaps
freely back and forth between Zelma’s innermost thoughts and ponderings and an
ongoing professorial dissertation of her behavior explained away with clinical
detachment by Biology. Soon, like
Baumane herself, she marries a Russian man named Sergei which proves to be
domineering and abusive before cutting ties and remarrying to a gender-bending
Swedish man named Bo. Everything we’re
seeing onscreen comes from some place within Baumane herself in what feels like
a confessional rather than a character study.
It’s Baumane’s diary and we’re here to watch.
Created through a process of wood engraved 3D environments
with two dimensional animated characters moving about the 3D live action
footage, a mixture of papier-mache and several coats of paint as well as stop
motion animation sequences, the look and movement of the camera around and
during the animation looks extraordinary.
One of the first films that came to mind while watching it was When
the Wind Blows which also utilized an unlikely mixture of animation and
practical photography effects. A labor
of love created independently over the course of six years with thousands of
Kickstarter backers including grants from Latvia, Luxembourg, Europe and the
United States, it is the kind of film studios won’t finance given the
specificity of the location and subject.
Though recorded in English, this is through and through an Eastern
European film with sensibilities and attitudes that come across here as a bit
more frank, honest and open about the gory details than we’re used to seeing or
hearing.
With Baumane herself handling the camerawork and editing,
the film has a raw energy to it that is unmistakably not for minors. Discussing in gynecological detail the inner
workings of Zelma’s body followed by Zelma’s own expressions of love, dismay
and trying to maintain her sense of self.
Much of the energies of this ensemble saga stem from the eclectic cast
of voice actors including but not limited to Matthew Modine, Stephen Lang,
Storm Large and Cameron Monaghan.
Dagmara Dominczyk is undoubtedly the voice of Zelma but the heart and
soul radiating throughout this live-action/animated enterprise is most
certainly Signe Baumane. Even without
appearing onscreen, it is obvious she is all over every frame with her own
misgivings about her bouts with romance readily apparent onscreen.
Released in 2022 Tribeca followed by a limited run
throughout numerous film festivals, My Love Affair with Marriage went on
to garner the Fredrikstad Animation Festival’s European Film Academy Award
nomination as the very first Latvian film to succeed at such. Very much a feminine story of a Latvian woman
making her way across the continents to her eventual current life, it functions
as a stark challenge to social norms expected of young European women in the
Soviet Union as well as questioning the whole notions of love, marriage and
companionship altogether.
Not an easy sit for most people, frequently confrontational
with biological animated renderings of female genitalia as Biology the character
drones on bloodlessly about what’s going on in Zelma’s body, My Love Affair
with Marriage if nothing else completely lays bare the personality and
sensibilities of its chief creator Signe Baumane. Co-produced by Matthew Modine who was briefly
reportedly in a relationship with Baumane at the time, My Love Affair with
Marriage isn’t going to be for most people but for the adventurous
cinephile keen on seeing animation revamped and revitalized from the ground up,
you’d be hard pressed to look further than this.
--Andrew Kotwicki
