Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage, on OVID.tv

Evidently, the Soviet regime ruined weddings and funerals, because they made them all about Communism rather than the people everyone came to honor. However, Baumane’s pseudo-proxy cannot really blame the old, bad state for the failure of her first marriage. Most of the culpability lies with her selfish ex, and maybe to lesser extent herself, for excusing his bad behavior for far too long. Yet, the real culprit is human biology, because it prompts bad decisions with its dopamine and the like in Baumane’s animated feature My Love Affair with Marriage, which premieres Friday on OVID.tv.

While the film starts on Russian-occupied Karafuto Island, “Zelma” mostly grew up in Latvia, where she didn’t take guff from any of her classmates. Yet, that perversely made her something of an outsider, since girls were expected to be meek. Consequently, it is on a day-trip to Vilnius where she loses her v-status, to Jonas, a much older artist. Of course, the loss of “purity” holds dire implications, even in the USSR. Yet, Zelma navigates such pitfalls better than her roommate, who dies as a result of an unplanned and untreated pregnancy.

Zelma assumes her marriage to Sergei will be the answer to everything, but eventually she recognizes what the audience knew all along. He is a cad and a user. She thinks Bo from Sweden will be different—and he is. Yet, it still doesn’t quite work. Actually, her second marriage is rather sad, because he is not a bad guy. Again, it is just a matter of chemistry, as “Biology” herself explains.

Periodically, the personification of biology narrates interludes that illustrate exactly what is happening to the neural receptors and the brain chemistry of the film’s characters. Think of these slightly surreal segments as if they were industrial films made for 1960s sex ed classes, adapted into animation by Bill Plympton. The first two or three are really cool and funny but the motif loses it potency over time. (Imagine if the Burt Reynolds control room skit in Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know had been stretched throughout the entire film.)

Yes, less probably could have been more, but Love Affair with Marriage is still a distinctive animated film from a refreshingly offbeat animator. Her previous feature Rocks in My Pockets is still the film you should start with, but together they make quite a revealing personal statement.

Regardless, Michelle Pawk delivers Biology’s lectures with the authority of a PhD and the sensitivity of an earth-mother. Matthew Modine sounds surprisingly youthful as Bo, while the great Stephen Lang perfectly expresses Jonas’s seductive sophistication. As Zelma and Sergei, Dagmara Dominczyk and Cameron Monaghan mostly sound callow and clueless, which is probably the whole point.

Maybe this all comes across as very deterministic, but the intention is to help viewers identify and break destructive psychological and chemical cycles. Love Affair has less to say about the Soviet era than Rocks in My Pocket, which adds a further intriguing dimension to the earlier film. However, Baumane undeniably forces viewers to examine life and love from her own unique perspective. Recommended for its off-kilter animation and its frankness, My Love Affair with Marriage starts streaming tomorrow (12/20) on OVID.tv.