A straight teacher, married with two kids, falls head over heels for a new male colleague. They begin the titular unusual affair.
An Unusual Affair (2002)
Eine aussergewöhnliche Affäre (original title)
Imdb user:
A new male colleague is introduced in a party an heterosexual married couple throws, and the husband starts growing an unseemly attraction that leads to an honest moving out, leaving wife and kids, openly admitting (after an unfortunate, careless incident exposing the two men in school – and in the eyes of a student) to his whole family his love towards another man.
All this is noble enough and anchored in believable, more or less honest performances. But the point of view of the direction and the lengths the script wants to go in portraying the crisis this may bring into a family, has a curious effect. Make the following mental experiment: place in the place of the male colleague’s a woman, and see if the structure of the narrative changes significantly. The answer is no. And ask yourself if what happens between the two men appears passionate and convincing enough when he is repeatedly asked on the seriousness of the affair. The answer is again no, so what we have is a film that falls flat on its face by seemingly touching a touchy social affair, while not giving and guarantying its specific structure, if it has one that actually and truly differentiates it from heterosexual love. To put it plainly, we feel more involved with the familial crisis rather than the blossoming (it feels rather stilted) love affair.
So, when in the end we have mom and kids talking about going to California and Hollywood, this comes off as a high-pitched bad irony (intended, actually towards whom?) that strikes a stringent note. It is so self-assured an attack, but the problematic structure of the film turns it into an inane ending.
An Unusual Affair (2002) – a str8-gay film by Maris Pfeiffer
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House of Boys (2009) – A gay drama film by Jean-Claude Schlim
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