Dnevnik ego zheny (2000) User Reviews

Bunin in exile

[lee_eisenberg · 6/10 · 21 December 2022]

Russia's submission to the 73rd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film probably won't be the easiest to find; I found it on YouTube. Aleksey Uchitel's "Dnevnik ego zheny" ("His Wife's Diary" in English) is about author Ivan Bunin's years in France after he had left revolutionary Russia. Specifically, the movie covers the era from the '30s to the '50s, and Bunin's affair.

The movie is slow-moving. I suspect that it deliberately was, to let the characters and the varieties of their emotions develop. Having known nothing about Bunin before seeing the movie, I found it interesting in that regard. People who want movies to be nonstop action and explosions should avoid this one at all costs. If you're in for something cerebral, then you might want to check this one out, although it certainly won't be for everyone.

Bunin, his wife and his mistress

[Zhorzhik-Morzhik · 9/10 · 8 March 2020]

"His Wife's Diary" is an almost biographical film by Aleksey Uchitel on the theme of the period in emigration in France of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin. The writer's creative torment and love throwing, the devotion and wisdom of his wife, as well as the intrigue and pettiness of their environment. All this against the backdrop of constant need, lack of money in a foreign country and longing for the homeland, where no heroes of the film will ever return.

Kind of frustrating and plotless.

[TokyoGyaru · 4/10 · 11 February 2021]

There's no plot, really, so it's just scene after scene of the same handful of people not doing much, talking, mostly arguing, and being emotionally OTT. There are a LOT of endless streams of fast-paced talking that last too long (a perfect example is the very beginning of the film--I legitimately almost turned it off right then and there). I don't know if this is a common Russian thing, but I've seen it before in another Russian film, and it's incredibly annoying.

The writer who won the Nobel is unlikable, top to bottom. (If he was a real person, the people who made the film certainly did him no favors.) He's every cranky, grasping, perverted old fart in one package. The only character I actually like is the bisexual woman with the ATROCIOUS eyebrows. I don't like or feel sorry for the wife because it couldn't be more obvious that her husband doesn't even like her, let alone love her, but I'd imagine she lived by the sunk cost fallacy. She has a similarly afflicted young man interested in her, but at least he has sense enough to go (not before nearly killing himself for love of her). The wife is weak, has no agency, no life outside of being a mother and nursemaid to her husband. I remember there was a time when I was younger that I thought age shouldn't be a barrier to whom I marry. Let's just say it only took one, very short experience to change my mind. I look at this movie, and I see the woman who didn't wise up but became an old woman before her time on account of a man she had to know didn't even love her. And for what? The anticlimactic final line seems to provoke that very question regarding her choices. Maybe the laugh at the very end was because they knew they'd gotten us to watch an entire plotless film of boring people outside of one character who wasn't even the focus.

S/N: The film failed to set up some things that happened. Aside from him trying to commit suicide, the film did nothing to imply the young man was so mentally unstable that he needed to be institutionalized--was something lost in translation? He didn't act any zanier than the wife. Also, nothing set up that the sidepiece was bisexual. Maybe we're just supposed to know because they're based on real people (?), but not everyone who watched the film would know that, and regardless a film should still follow film rules.