Take this waltz (2011)

Can you bear with a hipster-leaning indie movie about a middle-class couple in some nice Toronto neighborhood? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz surely has more than a few annoying sides : it's easy to be infuriated about respectable indie movies about respectable, rich white people who have respectable problems.

I guess this story could have been made anytime between 1850 and the present. It inhabits a particular modern problem, a problem of sticking to the safe haven of a nice and cozy wedding or trying out (or giving in to) one's spontaneous, unruly desires. Margot is married to Lou who has, to quote one reviewer, 'a shaggy likeability' . Lou is a cookbook writer, she is a writer. They share a beautiful home on a quiet street. One day she meets a guy she is instantaneously attracted to. The guy: the romantic, pensive kind - you guessed it: an artist. Turns out they are neighbors.

All of this seems predictable enough. What sets the film apart is perhaps its strangely old-fashioned tone. It is a tale of mores, really, in the sense that perhaps Henry James or Jane Austen would have had it. One can also say that Take this waltz plays out like a prolonged fantasy that nudges against reality. It's an elegant film: the depiction of Margot's rumination is sometimes cinematic in an interesting way, that plays with the ideas about 'respectability' and 'unruly desire'. But that is perhaps also the film's biggest problem: in playing with a classical scenario of adultery and choices, it is never quite resolved in what it wants to do. An example: it presents the new guy as a sensitive artist, the Erotic Female Dream but it also hints at him being a fucking unreliable asshole.

Take this waltz could be seen as a symptom of a cultural pattern - then its aesthetic choices would be in a way more bearable. That would be my good reading. The other one, towards which I am equally disposed, is that this film merely wants to present 'the eternal problem of married life'. Many reviewers praise it for being both 'true and honest' - so.

Sarah Silverman as an alcoholic is great, though.