Poly-ish Movie Reviews - Episode 51: 5 To 7

A married woman takes a lover, but can Joreth take yet another affair movie?

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It's so much worse when they manage to get you to like a movie before they turn it to shit.

No, you're not experiencing deja vu. I said that exact same line when I reviewed Paint Your Wagon. It's still true.

5 to 7 was a Netflix recommendation, so naturally I went into it expecting it to be a total shitstorm. Instead, I found it charming. The Netflix summary says: "an aspiring young novelist finds his conservative beliefs about love and relationships tested when a chance encounter outside a New York City hotel leads to an intense affair with a French diplomat's beautiful wife."

Everything about this descriptions says this movie should be terrible. The main character is said to be conservative and I can't get into movies unless I can connect to the characters. An "affair" implies a secret, and the qualifier "intense" leads one to imagine this is some sort of dark romantic thriller.

It was nothing like that. This was more like a romantic comedy, but surprisingly without any artificial conflict between the two lovers.

Brian is very young (to my ancient, middle-aged eyes), a 24-year old would-be writer living in New York. Walking down the street, he sees a beautiful woman smoking outside of a hotel. He crosses the street and manufactures a reason to start talking to her. She seems antagonistic to his overtures but invites him to meet her again at the same time and place next week.

So he does.

His appearance at the appointed time surprises her and she invites him to spend a couple of hours with her at a museum between 5 and 7 the following Monday. He agrees to that too. So they spend the time wandering around the museum, and later the park, getting to know each other. I still feel that she is sending him prickly signals, but apparently she is just being French.

Towards the end of their date, Ariel (as she is named) casually announces that she is married with 2 children and nearly a decade older than Brian. He is taken aback by this information and she responds as if confused that he would have a problem with it. She goes on to explain that she and her husband have an open marriage with very specific rules and it's all very normal and acceptable in her culture, and implies that Brian is a naive, uncultured, close-minded American and thinks his "conservative" monogamous beliefs are the weird ones.

Brian is unable to accept that consent is the element that makes something ethical or unethical not an arbitrary adherence to someone else's structure, and says he can't see her. Ariel says that Brian knows where she will be every Friday afternoon if he should change his mind. 3 weeks later, he does. So she gives him a hotel room key and says to meet her there at 5.

Apparently, according to Ariel, "5 to 7" is French slang for "open relationship", at least, of a particular type of open relationship. She says that it used to be literal - that it was a reasonable time of the day for a spouse's whereabouts to be ... fuzzy and unknown, so that's when people looked the other way while their spouses visited their affairs. Eventually, it morphed into a saying, something like a "5 to 7 relationship" that meant a primary marriage with side partners. But Ariel and her husband Valerie found the literal time to be convenient for their lifestyle so they keep with tradition. This makes her an "old-fashioned girl".

The bulk of the movie is vignettes of Brian and Ariel spending time together and we see their feelings for each other grow. We learn that Valerie has a mistress of his own and the two women know each other, and everyone in the equation feels content with the arrangement, except Brian. Even their kids are cool with things and at one point tell Brian that they're glad he's mummy's boyfriend and they welcome him to the family (which throws him for a loop because he didn't realize the kids knew).

So, at this point, I thought the movie was cute and all the non-monogamous people seemed well-adjusted and content, and I was willing to overlook the whole couple-privilege thing because everyone seemed to be happy with things, and the stuff that bothered Brian was less about the couple privilege and more about the very notion of non-monogamy. I got the impression that if they had more of a commune-style or network style relationship, he still would have been uncomfortable.

Until it became about couple-privilege. As it always does, because that's what happens with privilege. And with rules.

I have always said that if everyone just wanted to follow a rule, then a rule is not necessary. And if someone did not want to follow a rule, then a rule would not stop them.

Throughout the movie, we learn about Ariel's and Valerie's rules, w