I THINK I LOVE MY WIFE ss
Directed by Chris Rock | Written by Rock and Louis C.K.| With Rock, Kerry Washington, Gina Torres, Steve Buscemi, and Edward Herrmann
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With I Think I Love My Wife, Rock puts his color-blind ethic to the test, remaking a movie that’s not just white but white, bourgeois, and French: Chloe in the Afternoon (1972), the last of Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales.” The hero of Rohmer’s film, a handsome, low-key businessman, has begun to feel smothered by his life as a husband and father when into his life walks Chloe, an alluring but unstable friend from his bachelor days who’s looking for a job and possibly a lover. With every broad-minded rationalization he makes to accommodate her, he becomes increasingly corrupted, until he finds himself in her bedroom one day on the verge of committing adultery. As Rock explained to Smiley, he wanted to play a “grown man, with grown-man problems. And nobody was gonna cast me in one of these types of movies! So I had to write one.”
Rohmer was hardly above using a little lightweight shtick himself. One memorable sequence in Chloe, copied verbatim by Rock, is a fantasy in which the hero approaches women on the street and finds them miraculously open to his come-ons. But while Rohmer’s humor tends to spring quite naturally from the character’s desires and disappointments, Rock seems to be recycling bits from Caroline’s Comedy Hour. In Rohmer’s film the husband and wife run into Chloe while shopping; in I Think I Love My Wife Richard (Rock) and his wife, Brenda (Gina Torres), run into the sultry Nikki (Kerry Washington) while shopping for lingerie, so that Brenda’s sensible underwear can be contrasted with Nikki’s erotic panties. In another situation lifted from Rohmer, Richard reluctantly accompanies Nikki as she collects her things from another man’s apartment, but Rock ends the scene wildly in a shoot-out, setting up plot complications that never materialize. In an added episode, Richard takes some Viagra–the banana peel of the 21st century–and winds up in an ambulance with a paramedic plunging a syringe into his dick. Sacre bleu!
