FILM_REVIEWS_The Wife or silenced feminity
The Wife is about the life of a married couple of writers in which she, for love, gives up her independent life as a writer to devote herself to housework, looking after their child and helping her husband to improve his writing. However, her desire to write is so great that she ends up being his ''nigger'' in the shadows, improving the drafts of his books in such a way that he becomes a world-famous writer.
The wife not only gives literary flair to her husband's writing but also, on a personal level, tries to be sympathetic to his infidelities. Moreover, she encourages the son who aspires to be a writer and whose father, being imbued with success and professional recognition that he does not really deserve, not only does not value him but humiliates and degrades him to the point of having him annulled.
Years go by and he is awarded the first Nobel Prize for literature. They travel to Stockholm to receive the award, at which point a media stalk is mounted and he takes advantage of the opportunity to have another fling with a mythomaniac journalist.
In comes the biographer, an insistent young man who talks to the wife, trying to extract information about her award-winning husband and question his merits. The wife senses the biographer's intentions and is reluctant to give him what he asks for, even though she feels, through his seductive insinuations, that he wants more than information. A game begins between the wife and the biographer in which she will end up rethinking her life.
The film, in fact, questions the unconditional love of a wife; a woman who becomes a mother and builds her home out of bits of hay and nettle, possibly with a nun's school education and embroidery, where they don't teach how to smack somebody hard sometimes. The Wife, played by Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, convinces and entertains with their small gestures and subtle glances that weave a plot that is interrupted by the appearance of the journalist.
Christian Slater, the actor who plays the role, manages with sibylline flirtation to ignite the flame of femininity that we thought was extinguished in her. An elegant production and a juicy cast of great actors who, if it weren't for them, the story would hold up less well by playing too much with the clichés of well-known roles.
Diego Jiménez.