SYNOPSIS
Based on two works by Andre Dubus, WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE is a provocative drama about married life and its discontents. Keenly observed, the film charts the affair of a married man with his best friend’s wife and how their liaison upsets the delicate balance of relationships, culminating in a fling between their spouses. Unfolding from four alternating viewpoints, the story captures the paradoxical actions of loving parents determined to save marriages they secretly long to escape, as the couples struggle through their emotional and sexual entanglement. WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE reveals the perverse logic of infidelity and the complicity, denial and cruelty that can accompany it.
College instructors in a small university town, Jack Linden and Hank Evans have an easygoing friendship involving runs between classes and drinks at the pub after work. Jack’s wife Terry is best friends with Hank’s Edith, and the four have dinner parties where, once the kids have gone to bed, the wine flows freely and the record collection is in constant rotation.
But the Evanses and the Lindens are not the happy couples they appear to be. For Jack and Terry, the everyday tribulations of being parents of young children and trying to make ends meet have taken their toll on the once passionate couple. And Hank, a selfabsorbed writer at heart, is fond of his daughter and family life, but not all that interested in monogamy, it turns out. Trying to find a way to make her marriage work under the new circumstances, Edith turns to Jack for comfort. What begins as a playfully lascivious affair erupts into a season of infidelity, leaving all four to sift through the emotional wreckage to find their way home.