Movie Review-Last Night

On a simple level, "Last Night" is about infidelity and marriage. Infidelity in the movies, by itself, is typically a subject that I have no interest in exploring for a length of a movie, no matter what the reasons are for the partner, or partners, being unfaithful. It is like the horror genre. It is predictable. Someone will be killed. The bad guy will usually die. And if they want to make a sequel they will show the bad guy living at the end for about a fraction of a second. Infidelity movies, if this is such a genre, are similar. Someone gets a good lay. Someone gets hurt. And maybe if you're lucky, a couple will set up a new cycle for love, and possibly another affair. And with all this being said, I still wanted to turn off "Last Night" midway through, but was persuaded by my fiance to "see how it turns out". Sam Worthington and Keira Knightley play the married couple in the film. Eva Mendes and Guillaume Canet, play the prospective love interests. Watching the film with my fiance was enjoyable because naturally we were motivated to defend our gender: who lied first, who was being more unfaithful, who won (reverse scale) by the end. The film was directed by Massy Tadjedin and as soon as the film ended we googled to find out if it was autobiographical, if she was divorced, etc. She claims in an interview it was personal, but not autobiographical. The style of the film was very polished, in a New York chic, sort of way. The actors are all attractive. Without the quality of the actors and cinematography the movie would not work as well as it does. Is the movie about a marriage breaking up? Are we watching the beginning of a marriage about to unravel? At the end of the movie we are left with lies and questions. Personally, I wasn't moved to care whether they stayed together or if they left each other. The director didn't fall into the pedagogical trap, as Pauline Kael might describe it. She isn't on her soapbox telling us that marriage is awful, or that men (or women) are at fault for breakups. "Last Night" is like a slow motion shot of something exploding. There is something irresistible watching something that was once whole, shatter, tear and break in a million pieces slowly before your eyes.