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Settled into happy, possibly even productive lives, with kids and a good wife, we still see . . . Her. Why did it not work? Were we unkind? Was she too good for us? Did we meet someone else? Did she? At any rate, she usually visits in the minutes after the lights go out but before sleep ensues: There she is, eternally young, eternally adventurous, signifying a life we decided not to live, summing up possibilities we left unpursued and trailing in her wake a bubbling broth of regret, melancholy and even lamentation. (I am reliably informed that women have their version of the same visitor, but of course that's too disgusting to contemplate.) Anyway, back to men: That weird, hidden patch of guy hurt ("pain" is too powerful a word by half) is exactly the subject of Philip Saville's "Metroland," itself adapted from an early novel by Julian Barnes. It follows a young advertising executive's flirtation with the damnation of What If. In Chris's case, this melancholy is precipitated by the return to his life of a happy-go-lucky pal named Toni. Chris (Christian Bale) lives in Metroland, as he calls it, the comforting burbs of London, where he's got a son and a beauty of a wife and a prospering career. Toni (Lee Ross) has never "sold out," another term for "worked for a living." A scrawny, sexy pirate-sprite, he's probably had half the world's women and smoked a third of its pot, as he roamed from exotic locale to exotic locale, always in search of more women, more pot, less work. His life, compared with dreary Chris's, has been fabulous. And so Chris recalls his own past, and how it was he ended up where he was, while Toni went on to what he thinks is so much more. As youths in the '60s, they all but abandoned stuffy, bourgeois England for the more cosmopolitan culture of radical Paris, where--vive la France!--the normally reticent Chris actually found a woman who would have sex with him! No wonder he likes Gauloises so much. Annick (Elsa Zylberstein) was Bohemian, earthy, uninhibited; every boy's dream. She wore a beret before Monica and black stockings before Hanes got in the act. These memories unspool before Chris's lamenting eyes, unleashed by the protean Toni's return and by the primness of the woman that his wife, Marion, has become. Actually, she's become Emily Watson so I think he did okay, but the movie pretends that Watson is a kind of dour, duty-haunted English middle-class hausfrau. Soon enough, emboldened by his romantic recollections and convinced that Toni's life has offered so much more, Chris is sniffing after an "adventure"; he doesn't realize that the reason his marriage is so dull isn't Marion but himself. So the actual location of "Metroland" is Chris's mind. It's a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man. For soon he's lost in an orgy of memory, and he calls up, in all its brittle glory, the endgame of his relationship with Annick (which was the startgame of his relationship with Marion) and the instinctive attraction between them. They were, if Chris is too stupid to understand it even now, completely made for each other. What this movie is about is how smart guys can get themselves in a lot of trouble if they don't watch it. The best thing by far about "Metroland" is that it understands the mating shuffle, that strange dance of passive aggression and aggressive passivity by which opposing sexes probe each other and ultimately, after many centuries of contemplation, couple up, for better or for worse. And it's Chris's astounding discovery that he coupled up, when all is said and done, for better. The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm.
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