Let’s say that one night you attend a party with your husband, during which you meet one of his coworkers and discover that she is, like, very good looking, perhaps even better looking than you, though this is debatable as she may be merely voluptuous with an “okayish” face and you are undoubtedly “classic” all the way, a lot skinnier — but do guys even want that anymore? — and also British — though your accent is a bit Estuary, it is undeniably hot being British — and frankly, your character is a bit more well-defined: you’re a freelance fashion journalist, and though a frustrated novelist, you for some reason often find it difficult to tack an additional “100 words” onto a skimpy article; this new coworker, on the other hand, only has about 30 or so lines in the entire film, and her sole personality trait seems to be a vaguely obsessive-compulsive quirk about “only doing certain things if other things happen” — which makes sense because the actress playing her seems to be under the influence of sedatives throughout the film. So, after seeing her and your husband interact through a window, you begin to worry that they may sleep together during an upcoming business trip and later, after drinking more glasses of wine than your husband has prescribed — and, of course, it would be impossible for any couple to discuss a relationship issue unless the woman had consumed more glasses of wine than her husband prescribed — you air your suspicions. But doing so plants the idea and perhaps a feeling of guilt in his mind, so he actually ends up seriously considering cheating on you with the coworker. (Actually, there’s a distinct possibility that I’ve drawn this conclusion on my own: I have to admit, it’s never really clear; most of the first act is utterly pointless, almost like someone struggling to tack 100 lines onto a skimpy screenplay.) So, while he’s away and cheating on you, you run into an ex-boyfriend who’s also a writer and French so, naturally, you are attracted to him. He only has one night in town before returning to Paris and quite possibly getting married. You consider preemptively revenge-cheating with him and accept an invitation to have dinner with him and his friend. During the meal, one of your friends happens to be in the restaurant and asks how your husband is. How unlucky. When the friend of the French writer hears this, he begins to interrogate you, asking all of these kind of moralistic questions. Far from recoiling from this line of inquiry, or finding it sort of odd that this perfect stranger, whom you had no reason to suspect entertained such extreme connubial piety, is now trying to “guilt” you, you answer them, in a sense, “exposing” some of the details of the history of your marriage. This takes up a good amount of screen time (another hundred lines or so) and soon the meal is over. The French writer’s weird, rude friend invites you to a party, but suddenly you remember that you agreed to walk a friend’s dog, so you and the French writer go and pick up this dog. The camera focuses on the dog’s face for a while. It is a funny face, after all, being that of a dog. Sometimes it’s very close to the camera, so that it’s blurry, and this is sort of funny. At other times, shots of the dog’s face are juxtaposed with those indicating the surmounting sexual tension between the two writers, so the dog appears in some way sentient, which is both funny and interesting.
Well, if so, then you might be Joanna Reed (Keira Knightley) from writer/director Massy Tadjedin’s first feature, Last Night. The plot, moral value system, and entirety of my review of the film are as precedes.
