Summary
A brittle marriage-market fable set in the interwar hush of suburban drawing rooms, Wives and Old Sweethearts stitches petit-point irony onto crinoline melodrama: two former schoolgirl rivals—now respectively a bored matron and a sparkling divorcée—re-ignite their dormant duel when the divorcée returns from Europe armed with Parisian frocks and a reputation sharp enough to slice custard. The husband, a genial broker who believes affection is paid in quarterly instalments, finds his loyalty auctioned between cigar smoke and garden-party moonlight; the wives—current and almost-resurrected—manoeuvre through parlour games, country-club masquerades and midnight telephone calls that crackle like faulty radio, each woman brandishing nostalgia as both stiletto and shield. Around them, a Greek chorus of office clerks, bohemian cousins and fluttering mothers exchange quips that ricochet from vaudeville slapstick to drawing-room acid, while automobiles backfire like exclamation points and champagne flutes shiver in anticipation of breakage. Secrets are swapped, engagements broken, an elopement aborted at the whistle-stop—yet the film’s true coup is its refusal to punish appetite itself: by the final reel, every character stands amid confetti of compromised dreams, forced to inventory the cost of wanting more without naming the want.
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