It’s not a question of marriage

For gay, independent filmmaker Ira Sachs, words like marriage and monogamy are irrelevant in the face of what it means to be truly intimate with another human being.

In his latest feature film, Married Life, the Sundance Award-winning director delves into the realm of pleasures and burdens associated with intimacy, and the lengths it drives people to -” which can even include murder.

Based on a John Bingham pulp fiction Five Roundabouts to Heaven, Married Life tells of an otherwise loving husband Harry (Chris Cooper of American Beauty), who decides he must kill his wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson of Goodnight and Good Luck) to save her from the suffering it would cause if he was to run away with his mistress (played by Rachel Adams of The Notebook).

As the web of deception is woven ever tighter care of a meddling friend, played by Pierce Brosnan, the characters are forced to weigh up their personal desires against the threat of hurting others.

I’ve made three films now that deal with issues of deceit and secrets and their effect on people’s lives and I feel very strongly that that comes from having grown up as a gay person and that somehow I learned about intimacy and sex and love in the shadows, Sachs told Sydney Star Observer.

To me it’s very significant though that the film is not about the institution of marriage. It’s about any long-term relationship and the questions of intimacy that it raises. So for me as a gay man I very much see myself in these characters and in the problems that these characters face. I’m in a relationship now, that is monogamous by experience but not by rule, and in a way we’ve decided not to name it monogamous because we don’t want to perceive ourselves as so fragile. On the other hand though non-mono-gamy comes with a lot of baggage.

For filmgoers who are aware of Sachs’ previous works, including the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winning Forty Shades of Blue and his equally acclaimed debut The Delta, Married Life also marks a departure from another set of baggage -” the difficulties associated with working as an indie director.

Working with a much larger budget and a host of A grade Hollywood stars, Married Life marks Sachs’ entry into the mainstream, a notion which is welcomed by him.

As an independent filmmaker, as an American filmmaker if I want to have a career I have to incorporate certain elements of Hollywood and movie stars into my filmmaking. There’s no other career to be had, Sachs said.

I think that what’s exciting to me now is that I’m working on a film that has rich gay characters for the first time since my first feature, and that feels like something that I’ve earned. I didn’t consciously not do that in my last films but I somehow must have on some level unconsciously recognised that I needed to establish myself for a broader audience and now I have a chance to go back to telling the stories that are more directly personal.