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Film Review: Seeking Happily Ever After November 9, 2010

Seeking Happily Ever After: One Generation’s Struggle to Redefine the Fairy Tale.  Directed and Produced by Michelle Cove; Produced by Kerry David. 2010.

“I keep seeing parts of the movie in my head,” said my friend Monica at dinner, after we saw Seeking Happily Ever After at its DC screening. This is usually the sign of either a very inspiring movie, or a very disturbing one. Seeking Happily Ever After deftly manages to be both.  I hope our Copious Readers get a chance to check it out. If you don’t live near a screening, maybe you can arrange one in your area.

For the award-winning documentary, director Michelle Cove and producer Kerry David didn’t so much “interview” various single women (mostly heterosexual, but including at least two lesbians) as she let them talk–if and why they like their single lives, what “happily ever after” means to them, what their pasts were like and what their hopes are now.  My favorite was the thirty-something woman who said she could imagine herself being perfectly happy as an older single woman with white hair down to her butt, turquoise jewelery, and a bunch of cats milling around at her feet as she sipped a martini with girlfriends (I may be combining one or more interviews, but you get the idea).  The film is full of such gems.

But, like life, it’s also full of nails-on-chalkboard moments of awkwardness and horror. Cove and David don’t whitewash the world of single women. (more…)