My Love Affair with My Love Affair with Marriage
Some films make you want to look up the director's biography after the credits. Others make you open a neuroscience textbook. Signe Baumane's My Love Affair with Marriage manages to do both.
On the surface, it's a story of a woman who marries twice. But marriage isn't really the subject. Consciousness is. Who is thinking my thoughts—me, my hormones, the stories I grew up with, society, or all of them taking turns?
Baumane explores these questions with a dazzling visual language. Hand-drawn characters move through tactile papier-mâché sets, biological diagrams appear, surreal images and musical numbers emerge naturally from the protagonist's inner life. I especially loved the chorus of siren-like women singing inside her head. What first feels whimsical gradually becomes something deeper: the internalised voice of society—every fairy tale and cultural expectation turned into melody. And then something beautiful happens. She doesn't silence them; she becomes their conductor, asking them to sing something else.
The film resonated deeply with me, partly because, like Baumane, I grew up between Soviet and post-Soviet worlds. No one tells you directly that your life is incomplete without a husband, but the message is everywhere until it starts sounding like your own thoughts. That's why, for me, the film isn't really about marriage. Marriage becomes a laboratory for self-discovery. We understand ourselves through relationships, through contact with others who reflect us back. The second husband's story especially moved me. His honesty about his identity becomes the mirror in which she sees something hidden in herself. That scene made me cry.
I don't feel especially attached to conventional performances of femininity—make-up, dresses and all that. So watching that recognition was quietly devastating. I also appreciated the attempt to explain love through biology rather than myth, even if some of the science may age faster than the film itself. Still, I disagree with the implication that everything can be reduced to biology. If we're just biochemistry, how do we explain the existence of independent animation? Spending years making a deeply personal film doesn't feel like a purely biological impulse.
My only real criticism is the ending. It felt abrupt. She finally hears her own voice, but then the film just... stops. I wanted an epilogue. Understanding yourself isn't the same as learning how to live with that understanding. And the real Signe Baumane seems to have written that epilogue in life: she built her own studio, made more films, and kept chasing the voice that's hers. That's the ending the movie never quite shows, but quietly promises.
On the surface, it's a story of a woman who marries twice. But marriage isn't really the subject. Consciousness is. Who is thinking my thoughts—me, my hormones, the stories I grew up with, society, or all of them taking turns?
Baumane explores these questions with a dazzling visual language. Hand-drawn characters move through tactile papier-mâché sets, biological diagrams appear, surreal images and musical numbers emerge naturally from the protagonist's inner life. I especially loved the chorus of siren-like women singing inside her head. What first feels whimsical gradually becomes something deeper: the internalised voice of society—every fairy tale and cultural expectation turned into melody. And then something beautiful happens. She doesn't silence them; she becomes their conductor, asking them to sing something else.
The film resonated deeply with me, partly because, like Baumane, I grew up between Soviet and post-Soviet worlds. No one tells you directly that your life is incomplete without a husband, but the message is everywhere until it starts sounding like your own thoughts. That's why, for me, the film isn't really about marriage. Marriage becomes a laboratory for self-discovery. We understand ourselves through relationships, through contact with others who reflect us back. The second husband's story especially moved me. His honesty about his identity becomes the mirror in which she sees something hidden in herself. That scene made me cry.
I don't feel especially attached to conventional performances of femininity—make-up, dresses and all that. So watching that recognition was quietly devastating. I also appreciated the attempt to explain love through biology rather than myth, even if some of the science may age faster than the film itself. Still, I disagree with the implication that everything can be reduced to biology. If we're just biochemistry, how do we explain the existence of independent animation? Spending years making a deeply personal film doesn't feel like a purely biological impulse.
My only real criticism is the ending. It felt abrupt. She finally hears her own voice, but then the film just... stops. I wanted an epilogue. Understanding yourself isn't the same as learning how to live with that understanding. And the real Signe Baumane seems to have written that epilogue in life: she built her own studio, made more films, and kept chasing the voice that's hers. That's the ending the movie never quite shows, but quietly promises.
16.09.2026