My Love Affair With Marriage is an animated 2022 comedy-drama charting the life and loves of an Eastern European woman. The film attempts to balance bitter/ sweet human experience, quirky biological descriptions, and more than a few soulful Greek chorus set songs.  Here from MVD Visual is a recent Blu-Ray release of the film- featuring a lengthy interview with the film's director and a trailer.

My Love Affair With Marriage is a joint Luxembourg, US, and Latvian production. It was written, directed and edited by Signe Baumane- a Latvian-born, Brooklyn-based independent filmmaker. Between the early 90s and the present day she has seventeen other credits to her name- all but one of these have been shorts, her only other feature was 2014’s Rocks In My Pockets- another animated drama regarding mental health within a family.

The film focuses on Zelma (Dagmara Dominczyk)- we first meet her as a pre-schooler in a small village on a small island off the coast of the then soviet Union. She’s a curious and adventurous child- and as she starts school she’s not behaving as a young girl should fighting back against a boy pulling her hair.

Over the film nearing two-hour runtime, we see young Zelma move with her parents from the island to Riga Latvia. Following her early child/ teen crushes, her development & changes from a girl to an adult, and her three marriages. 

The animation style features often side-drawn faces/ figures- with prominent eyeballs been the defining element of the subjects. We get quirky/ charming shifts from human to animal figures- with Zelma often shifting into a claws-out large cat. Blended in with the unfolding drama- we keep shifting to human biological explanation of what is occurring within  Zelma, and those around her. The whole thing is finished off with quirky off-broadway-like songs, which are all led by soulful Greek chorus female vocals.

I’ll have to admit when I put the film in, and saw the runtime of one hour and forty-six minutes I was somewhat apprehensive. As, on paper, it sounded way too long for a quirky animated comedy-drama, but I found the whole thing largely enduring/ charming with the nearing two hours speeding by.

I’ll have to admit in the first half or so of the film I found the sudden unprompted outburst into song by the three bird-winged female singers a tad trying- though I’m not the biggest fan of musicals. Also at points, the biological breakdowns of what is going on in Zelma do come off rather condescending & lecture-like- not always hitting the quirky charm I guess these elements are going for.

Though, all in all, I was pleasantly surprised by  My Love Affair With Marriage- finding it a frank, largely engaging/ enduring, and at points heartwarming/heartbreaking film.

The film has one main extra, aside from the trailer, which is an onstage lecture/ interview from writer/ director/ editor Signe Baumane- this runs around the fifty-eight-minute mark and sees her charting the seven years it took to make the film a reality.

It’s always rewarding to watch & enjoy something out of your normal tastes, and that’s exactly what I found with My Love Affair With Marriage. So I’d say give it a go, check out the trailer here, and see if it may be for you.