On Marriage

Product Information

I have recently codirected a second feature film with Josh Appignanesi. Husband is in its final stages of production and should be released into festivals and cinemas in 2022. The film is a docufiction/‘remarriage comedy’ portraying a marriage undergoing various stresses in a comical vein. It focuses on a trip I made to the US with my family when my first book was published. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. Husbandis cut from the same cloth, a doc in which the hapless but well-meaning Josh chronicles the book promotion process with his persistent camera, all the time feeding Devorah’s slow-burning (and justifiable) anxieties. I have also given broader researched based interviews for different platforms, as here. And in October 2017 my research was the subject of a feature profile in Times Higher Education.

For me it was because I found myself doing something I never imagined myself doing: marriage. I always knew marriage doesn’t work – just look at my parents.Yes, the film was around pregnancy, and just as she’d found it hard to get pregnant, I’d found it hard to get a film off the ground. So, too, when we found out the pregnancy had gone wrong, I feared for the continuation of the film as well. Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. . . . A fascinating exploration.”—Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian The author and film-maker explores the landscape of matrimony in an erudite and entertaining quest for enlightenment Like many modern marrieds Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi wrestle with this question — but they do it on screen. In Husband the filmmaking couple investigate the intimate dynamics of their relationship, with the camera rolling. Gulp!

There are no “patriarchal expectations” in a humanist marriage. That may explain why a 2019 BBC survey found that couples who’d had a humanist wedding were almost four times less likely to divorce than those who’d had a civil one, three times less likely than those who’d had a Roman Catholic one, and more than two times less likely than those who’d had a Church of Scotland marriage.Eighteen years on, humanists are still campaigning to give couples in England and Wales the same freedom as those in Scotland. That day can’t come soon enough for me. That, at least, is her stated intention, though by the time she reaches her epilogue, she finds herself questioning her own motives: “I’m married to someone I feel I can’t live without. Could that even be what this book is up to in the end? Was writing it my way of trying to tell someone that?”

Nonetheless for me it remains an interesting question when a writer or filmmaker chooses to make their own life the subject of their work. And in your case, because it’s a documentary, the intention is for it to be your life as it happens. Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. She draws on a formidably broad frame of reference, from Kant to Fleabag via George Eliot and Nora Ephron, and any number of intriguing detours through less familiar literary and cinematic representations. But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity.”That response reminds me of the parable by Kafka about the leopards who break into the temple. The first time they’re horrified, but since the leopards keep breaking in the priests decide to make that disruption a part of the ceremony. Because to me it seems there’s something performative not only about making a film, but in the way you both speak, for example, about hating each other. It was partly asserting the right to life – this life – and the right to represent it. There’s a deep reticence or sense of shame in this country around representing on screen our class of people, the so-called liberal or metropolitan elites, which I find disingenuous. Which doesn’t mean our film doesn’t poke fun at our social class – it does – but it also shows the love we have for our friends and family. And why not? I want to be able to unashamedly say I love these people, in these harsh times more than ever. And by the end of the film we do see, in any case, the universal ‘rites of passage’: marriage, birth, death – the great levellers. When I interview them he’s every bit as likeable as his lovely and collected wife. And they are both very funny. Drawing on philosophy, film, fiction, comedy, psychoanalysis, music and poetry, Devorah Baum considers the marriage plot. What are we really talking about when we talk about marriage? And what are we really doing when we say, 'I do'?