A love triangle is never just a love triangle

"Past Lives for Canadians" or "mumblecore When Harry Met Sally": Matt and Mara (2024)

There’s a scene in Matt and Mara where Mara is at dinner with her hot musician husband and several of his musician friends. She, for no reason really, tells them all that she doesn’t like music. Mara is no stranger to creativity—she’s a writer, a writing professor, and her family’s apartment is full of books. But still, with very little prompting, she tells this table full of career musicians, “I don’t really listen to music,” just casually as if she’s not expecting this to be at least a little offensive or, at best, confusing. She tells them that “the feeling you get when you watch a musical, like, ‘why are these people breaking out into song, this doesn’t make any sense’ is how I feel about all music.” She’s visibly annoyed throughout the entire conversation, despite the fact that everyone is conciliatory (“But it sounds like you get that feeling from other things,” one woman says kindly). And then, in the car on the way home, she complains to her (musician) husband that everyone was ganging up on her for saying she doesn’t like music. This is, in short, the least self-aware woman I have ever seen on screen.

That’s the moment that I was like, okay I love this movie.

The movie is called Matt and Mara, but it’s really about Mara—we see very little from Matt’s POV. We are always with Mara, and yet we learn so little about her. Here’s what we know: She lives in Toronto and teaches writing at a university. She has a hot musician husband and a toddler. She loves to wear turtlenecks. And then…Matt shows up.

Matt is a big guy with notable glasses and messy hair. He’s also her college writing buddy and you get the sense that, while showing up unannounced right before she teaches a class isn’t something she expected, it’s probably just the way he does things. While Mara makes her living teaching, Matt is a capital-W Writer with a lauded book called Rat King (perfect title, perhaps only eclipsed by the Boner in Past Lives). Matt is sort of a Canadian literary world bad boy, which is to say the rest of the world might not know who he is but a certain group of people really know who he is. And you can sense, right away, that he and Mara have a complicated history.

To get into this film, you need to be willing to get on its wavelength, to vibrate at its frequency, to accept the way it wants to tell a story. I remember when Past Lives came out and I saw complaints that it wasn’t dramatic enough—and that’s because, I think, people expected a love triangle. And that is sort of present in the film, but ultimately Past Lives isn’t about a love triangle at all. Yes, there were two men, but any love triangle story is never about the men—it’s about what those two men represent. The men themselves aren’t really the point, they are simply the metaphor that represents two lives the heroine must choose between, packaged in hunky wrapping. Past Lives largely did away with that metaphorical romantic tension and focused almost entirely on the subtext, making it less of a “will they won’t they” and more of a “mourning an entire life that never was.” Which is what, of course, made it such a lovely film and an Oscar nominee—we likely wouldn’t be talking about it if it was just “this guy showed up and is she into him??” We talk about it because of that scene at the bar where Nora is talking to Hae Sung in Korean while Arthur is just sitting there, or the scene at the end when Hae Sung leaves and Nora sobs in Arthur’s arms.

This is the top Letterboxd review for Matt and Mara

Matt and Mara, however, does not have that backstory. We don’t ever get a clear explanation of what, exactly, type of relationship Matt and Mara had in college, although we can tell something happened—maybe there’s a reason they haven’t been in close touch. The film stays right there in the present, letting you fill in their past.

The summary of the film online says that Mara is in a “struggling” marriage, but this doesn’t present itself in big fights or any kind of drama. Mara just seems…bored. I mean, there’s the whole thing about how she doesn’t understand her husband’s profession/calling on a fundamental level, but it’s also clear that they just aren’t connecting. They’re not spending a ton of time together and most of their interactions happen around their toddler. They seem more like roommates.

Whereas we immediately see that Mara is a more lively person when Matt is around, which I think it where the film shines. The actress who plays Mara, Deragh Campbell, is so pretty in a way that has always been mysterious to me, by which I mean that she looks pretty with no makeup. She looks like some beautiful elvin creature, or as I kept thinking, Normal Tilda Swinton. Not a stitch of eye makeup on this lady, a situation to which I cannot relate. If I don’t draw on my eyebrows every day, my face fades into the wall. If I don’t wear eyeliner, the neighborhood kids ask what’s wrong with me (unfortunately this isn’t an exaggeration). Around Matt, she’s smiling, she’s jumping over fountains, she’s having the fun that she’s clearly not having at home or her job.

In a very funny moment, Mara is talking to a friend/colleague about the writing conference she’s going to in Ithaca (she has to get a new passport photo for this trip and it’s a whole thing but you just have to watch it yourself). The friend is like, “oh, I hate writing conferences, everyone has an affair!” And when Mara is like, “😦” her friend is like, “No, that’s the entire point of writing conferences!” Can I tell you that I have never been so glad to be working in commercial fiction instead of literary fiction? I’m not sure the book festivals I go to are conducive to affairs (they’re barely conducive to eating the sandwich lunch you get for free—they’re busy!). I’ve never been invited to a romance convention¹ but from what I see online it’s mostly women doing karaoke and trading friendship bracelets. I do NOT think a guy like Matt would clean up at a romance convention…they would not be into his glasses or the bad things he would say about romance as a genre.

When her husband can’t drive her to the conference because he has musician stuff to do, you’re like…uh-oh. Because who’s in town, has nothing much to do, and would love to drive Mara across the border? You know it’s Matt. Yeah, they’re going to a hotel in Ithaca together and this isn’t going to end well.

Matt kisses her at Niagara Falls, a great place for a clandestine kiss (very romantic, with the spray and those ponchos). It’s a great scene, filmed in a way that feels genuinely surprising. This isn’t a film that lingers on their faces, letting them get closer inch by inch. He kind of swoops in from the right side of the screen where you can barely see him, giving you a moment of cognitive dissonance where you’re a little disoriented. Did he just kiss Mara?

Anyway, they get to the hotel and they promise to meet in the lobby to get dinner after her talk. That’s the whole reason she’s there—she bought a whole new turtleneck for it. A little thing about Mara is that she almost exclusively wears turtlenecks—a yellow/tan one throughout most of the movie, and then when she’s getting ready for the conference she goes out and tries on a red turtleneck. This is her formal turtleneck! When you look like Normal Tilda Swinton, you simply don’t need much to look great.

It’s gonna take her awhile to style the turtleneck for her talk, so she tells Matt not to come back to her room, although it’s unclear if she just has some hesitation about what might happen. But when her talk is over (realistically shown as a 1/3 full auditorium with people scattered throughout), Matt is nowhere to be seen in the lobby. It’s only after she gives up on him and goes back to her room to eat in bed that he texts her and she realizes he’s been out with the hottest writer at the conference! Yes, the writing conference in Ithaca has an It Girl, and Matt found her in an elevator.

The next morning on their drive home, Mara is mad. Matt ditched her, which she alludes to being a pattern for him. They’re basically dancing around the fact that they would have totally slept together last night if he had been there (wait, is this the 70s romance I was longing for mere weeks ago?). Matt blurts out that he loves her and that makes Mara madder, and that makes me even madder! Like, okay, but that’s not the point, bud. If he loves her, then why is he acting like this? I kept waiting for him to be like, “But I’m afraid of commitment” or “I’m afraid of losing you” or whatever sort of excuse we are so used to seeing in films and books…but then I realized I was using my commercial fiction brain (which, to be fair, is a big part of my brain because it’s the part that makes money). If this were a commercial fiction novel, of course we would know Matt and/or Mara’s motivations in all these scenes because novels have interiority. A film simply does not have that interiority unless we have a narrator (which only works sometimes) or a character who is narrating their actions (almost never works) or a character who is using dialogue as exposition (never works, happens often). But also, in a romance novel these characters would have to have a conversation about their feelings for the reader to be satisfied. If I sent something to my editor and was just like, “Well, he says he loves her but we don’t really know why!”…I would need to change that! They would need to have a conversation that explicitly lays out their feelings. That’s, like, the entire point of a grand gesture. But this is a film, and it’s a 2024 mumblecore revival film. It just isn’t operating in that particular sphere. I guess there’s no real point to this aside other than to say that I so appreciate watching things that are markedly different than what I work on.

Matt and Mara driving home from the conference.

Matt does not explain himself. We do not get a clear resolution for their relationship, although there’s another great scene that happens between them that’s genuinely moving. Mara goes home and asks her husband if she can listen to the song he’s been working on, and she slips the headphones on and closes her eyes. We can’t even hear the song clearly, let alone get an idea of what she’s thinking, but we can see that she’s trying here.

The movie ends on a pretty perfect scene that I won’t spoil for you, which makes it sound like it’s going to be big and dramatic but you’ve read this whole post, you know it’s not! It’s a quiet little scene that puts the movie to bed and I loved it.

At times when I watched this film, I was actively annoyed by both main characters, and sometimes cringing at their behavior. Matt is a man you’ve definitely run into if you went to school for writing, and you were annoyed by him then—he is a type, and the way that Mara’s friend/colleague talks about his book is so funny. And Mara, with her complete cluelessness in regard to her own actions and the way her behavior affects others, is sometimes hard to take. But that’s what makes them feel like real people. They aren’t larger than life, they are exactly the size of life, and that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about this film after I’d finished it. It felt like I’d been in it, like it was a story a friend told me about a really bad writing conference they attended. It’s quiet, it’s slow, it’s what we sometimes called “slice of life” in school but I hate that phrase so much. I loved it, in case that isn’t obvious.

Matt and Mara is currently streaming on MUBI, which I got three months of for only $1 on a promo they were running in February. I intended to watch The Substance but lost interest almost immediately. Now I’m watching the Elizabeth Sankey (a former HelloGiggles writer, shout out to any and all former HelloGiggles² writers lol) documentary Witches, which is very very good. According to IMDB, it “examines the relationship between cinematic portrayals of witches and postpartum depression, utilizing film history footage alongside personal testimony.” I love a documentary that shows movie clips (see also: Room 237) and I loved (maybe loved is the wrong word) hearing her personal story.

As always, please forgive any typos or errors and remember that I am a human being, just like you (unless you are a robot or perhaps an animal that learned to read). See you next week. xo

1. I hope this doesn’t sound bitter because it genuinely isn’t. I don’t even do karaoke. I would be out of place there.

2. I just checked out HelloGiggles for the first time in awhile and I don’t think they’ve published anything since 2023. Hmm! My only real thought is that I hope Molly made a LOT of money when they sold.