I Write My Life

A couple are separating - her choice; he wants them to stay together, although the relationship is clearly toxic. He talks to friends and relatives to find out what went wrong, only to find his wife's friends dislike him as much as she does, and are well aware of her lesbianism. The support he gets is minimal - one of his friends (or his brother) is more bothered that he will no longer see video of her performing oral sex on her husband; another smears her name, although it was he who tried to seduce her; even his mistress seems no longer interested in him or his self-pity. He tries to tell a work colleague a fake reason for the separation, but she tells him everyone knew about his wife being gay.

Meanwhile the woman, Sophie, gets straight into a relationship with a woman. Sophie is the narrator of the whole story, so it is not always clear who is speaking, or even who is real. Some imagined personalities appear as real people - a priest is tempted by a bride, for example.

The story moves at a very slow pace, and Sophie's philosophical discourse can become repetitive. Conversations between other characters is simply crass. The more the man's mistress speaks, the more we wonder why she continued to tolerate him.

Many ideas are repeated from Velvet (2021), with Sophie Reinhart again playing Sophie, again spending time outdoors naked, again being the sole voice heard. Even some of the locations are reused, and the same very limited information in the opening and closing credits. This work is longer than Velvet, and has more characters in more places, but both are austere tales of loveless relationships, apart from Sophie's new unnamed belle. Not an easy watch.