(courtesy IMDb)
Ruts – some people love and crave them; most people though hate them, grudgingly only accepting their existence because life is so busy and full and unrelenting, that stopping to blender them up exuberantly into something refreshingly and excitingly new seems like far too much trouble.
And who has that kind of emotional bandwidth?
If you had asked Iris Beaulieu (Laure Calamy), protagonist of Iris and the Men (Iris et les hommes) before one fateful parent/teacher night, she would have likely agreed that she didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything about her moribund marriage to the handsome and seemingly flawless Stéphane Beaulieu (Vincent Elbaz), juggling a brilliantly well patronised dental practice, two scholastically committed daughters aged 10 and 15 (Lili and Anna, played by Daphné Crépieux and Zoé Richard respectively) and running a home set in one of those archetypically lush Parisian apartments.
To anyone glancing in her direction, Iris has it all, and yet when she’s asked, in the middle of an incredibly intense massage session, how things are going with her husband, she simply says “They’re not”, suddenly aware that she and Stéphane are all stultifying domesticity and life admin box ticking, and not much else.
Where’s all the passion gone? And why, when she searches for who they used to be, doesn’t struggle to find even a trace of the vibrant couple who got together 22 years earlier and married six years later?
It’s a huge, gaping realisation to have drop in her lap, and it’s only when a fellow parent recommends a particular app that largely caters to married people seeking lovers on the side, that Iris begins to have even a semblance of an idea of how to respond.
While she’s a little hesitant at first, she quickly gets over any lingering concerns about cheating on her husband, and signs up to the app, where she discovers that out there in the carefully curated world of her stuffy marriage, there are men raining down from the virtual heavens, all eager to energise her sexually, and as it turns out much to her great surprise, existentially.
Iris aka Isis for the purposes of somewhat anonymous hook ups – yep, not too great a divergence from her actual name, illustrating that straight-laced Iris, who got together with her husband when they young, doesn’t quite understand what she’s getting into at first – quickly acclimates to her new clandestine lifestyle, even though it does cause havoc for her socially and professionally.
But while that’s an issue, and her assistant at the practice, Nuria (Suzanne De Baecque) doesn’t appreciate the stress that the constant notification alerts on her boss’s phone and the endless rescheduling of patient appointments causes her, Iris soon finds herself having the time of her life, her hesitancy and acquiescence to what her male lovers want soon giving over to a well-defined and well-enforced sense of what she wants from her digitally-propelled adultery.
Iris and the Men (Iris et les hommes), which is funny and sweet and buoyantly liberating, full of hope and possibility, is at heart less about the sleeping around, though that’s executed with just the right mix of awkwardness and pleasure, and more about Iris, who it is intimated had a less than ideal upbringing, leading her to play it safe, finding who she is and what she wants out of life.
Watching her overcome her initial reticence to break free of the too safe bonds of her life – it’s not so much the marriage that is broken as Iris herself and as she heals, and interestingly her husband too (the final scene playfully shows how), so does her marriage and her life overall – is a real joy, with all the transformative captured by Laura Calamy’s gleefully nuanced and highly emotive face.
In fact, much of the great delight that comes from watching Iris and the Men (Iris et les hommes) comes from seeing how Calamy handles the challenges of planned, systematic adultery and how the men she encounters from sweet, needy Julien aka Alphonse through to the hilarious kink of No Vanilla guy, who seem to need her more than she needs them, makeover her life for the better.
The script itself is slight and mildly funny and never really reaches the heights of farce that the premise of the movie really calls for, but it’s strong enough and suitably engaging that Calamy is able to elevate it and turn it into something quite sweetly affecting.
That’s the surprising thing; what looks like a naughty romp through infidelity and the many divergent, quirky personalities that happen onto Iris’s path soon become something quite charmingly liberating as the film’s protagonist discovers that random sexual encounters on her terms help to really discover what she needs most in her life.
Iris and the Men (Iris et les hommes) is a cleverly inventive riff on the usual rom-com structure, taking someone who has ostensibly found true love but like almost everyone in a long-term relationship, is trapped in the stasis of the same-old, same-old, and who by breaking the usual conventions that apply to marriage, finds the kind of rejuvenation that usually evades most people.
It may not be quite as uproariously funny or insightful as it hopes to be but director Caroline Vignal – she cowrote the script with Noémie de Lapparent – but Iris and the Men (Iris et les hommes) is still a playful, quietly exuberant and thoughtfully insightful look at how we choose to handle the ruts in our life and how even the most unconventional of approaches can remake our lives and bring life back to barren grounds for the betterment and delight of all concerned.