Review: Five Moments of Infidelity (2006)

[Darren Provine]

In the movie "Flirting with Disaster", Tina Kalb (played by Tea Leoni)
says that "Every marriage is vulnerable, otherwise being married
wouldn't mean anything, would it?"

"Five Moments of Infidelity" is a movie which looks at some of the ways
in which relationships can be vulnerable to infidelity, and exactly
what constitutes "cheating".  As the title suggests, the movie looks at
five couples, along with their children and friends, and tries to
give us a sense of all five.  But in a span of 90 minutes, it's hard to
give a good picture of so many couples.  I wasn't able to make any
sense at all of why one of the pairs ever got together in the first
place -- they had no scenes together outside their apartment, and only
one in which they seemed even to be getting along at all.

Another problem is that the elements of plotting which connect the five
couples and their friends together seem a bit contrived.  It's necessary
to have the stories overlap, or the movie would be a set of disconnected
narratives.  But there should be some more straightforward way of having
all the characters run into each other.

For the most part, I believed the characters were actual people doing
what they did and feeling what they expressed.  Some of it seemed a
bit stupid, but people do stupid things, and people set themselves up
for disappointment, which they suffer when it happens.  A movie where
everyone only does the right things wouldn't be believable.

It might have been a better movie if it had been "Three Moments of
Infidelity", and dropped out the family with the teenage daughter and
the gay couple.  The story of the family with the daughter seemed sort
of pasted on, and the improper behaviour seems is beyond anyone's line
that shouldn't be crossed.  The gay couple's point of contention seemed
over the top.  (More below the spoiler line.)  The remaining couples,
it seems to me, had more potential, and would have been more
interesting if only we'd gotten to see more of what was going on in
their relationships.  Show us how the two who fight got together; show
us what went wrong with the lawyer and her husband; let us see why the
secretary's expectations are so far off.  Fill in those stories, and
let the others go by the wayside.

Also, those three could be connected a little more simply, without
requiring the story to make great leaps of plot in a single bound.

That any attempt was made at all to look at how different couples might
have different ideas of "infidelity" is at least notable.  What's most
interesting here is the idea that "everybody has a line they don't want
crossed" -- the people in the stories have different ideas of what
partners in a couple should and should not do.  What's important to the
people in these relationships is not the external rules that any
particular social subgroup cares about, it's about what lines they've
worked out for themselves.  That idea deserved a better movie with
richer characters.

Overall, my reservations about this movie come down to "more breadth
than depth" -- it's giving brief sketches instead of detailed studies.
If you want detail, you'll need to look elsewhere.  But if you like
broad sketches, this movie may be one you'd enjoy.


The DVD extras include improvisation of the back stories; how did they
meet?  What annoyances make the fighting couple fight all the time?
They apparently did this so that actors had more fully formed ideas of
who their characters were.  This is exactly what I'd have liked to see
more of in the actual movie, so the audience would have a more fully
formed idea of who these people were.

In the DVD extras, the writer/director of the movie says she based the
film on actual people she knew, and so perhaps she didn't see any need
to fill in details.  Maybe we just hang out with different people.

The movie is not rated.	 Were it rated, it would almost certainly be
"R", for sex, nudity, adult themes.


 [ spoilers ]

I said that the gay couple's problem was over the top.  They apparently
have an open relationship, with some simple rules about "only one time
with any partner, and then they're gone".  But one sleeps with the
other one's boss.  Surely that's not someone who is going to be gone
the next day, right?  He has to have known the boss was on the "No"
list, but we're never given any satisfactory reason why he went ahead.

Also, the scene where the secretary discovers that the boyfriend has
brought home another woman seems off.  Firstly, we find out that she's
known her boyfriend for a month, and they've apparently been physically
intimate for most of it.  But she never says that they've got any sort
of exclusive relationship, and it's not clear why she expects any such
thing.  His choice of artwork (a woman in her underwear, seen from
behind) is notable in that there's no face visible.  That's apparently
not part of a woman that's important to him.  And secondly, she says he
told her to use the spare key any time, and even told her where it
was.  If he was planning to bring home other women, as it seems he was,
that's not the sort of thing he'd tell his girlfriend.  That he doesn't
remember it later may excuse why he brought the new girl to his
apartment -- but it seems like the sort of thing he'd try to avoid
saying.  "Use the spare key anytime" doesn't strike me as an empty
phrase along the lines of "We'll have lunch."

The least plausible part of the movie, in my view, is that Billy's
girlfriend breaks up with him, shortly afterwards he has sex with
the girlfriend's boss, and then shortly after that he runs into the
ex-girlfriend of his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend.  In a city of
nearly 4 million people, that's a bit of a stretch -- even for a
movie.