A peculiar love triangle. English ambassador Peter Jones (Anthony Higgins) sends a detective to find where his wife Margaret (Charlotte Rampling) goes nearly every day. She has taken a small flat, and he goes there, only to discover that her lover is Maxa chimpanzee. Max comes to live with them, and jealousy complicates matters. It's hard for Peter to accept that Margaret loves both of them. The story is resolved with understanding. As a fable about sex, it remains puzzling, though probably the moral of the story is that people like different things, and if nobody gets hurt, what's the big deal? The plot itself, of course, is absurd, and some of the fringe characters play it for comedy, especially the experts the Jones' friends try to introduce, and the maid Maria (Victoria Abril), who seems to be allergic to Max. But the center of the film is tense, even severe at times. Still, Peter is mostly elegant and bothered in much the same way he'd be bothered by jealousy accompanying the usual sort of affair, and Margaret is smiling and self-possessed and calm. Rampling and Higgins play perfectly in the mode of comedy that has its characters act around a crazy premise as if it were ordinary, and so the film is improbably charming.
Review of Max My Love
