“The Story of My Wife” is actually the husband’s story. One day, Jakob Störr, a hard working Dutch freighter sea captain living in the ninteen-twenties, makes a bet in a café to marry the first woman who enters the place. He wins the bet and his clear, simple life changes forever. As large men in general (he weighs well over 200 pounds), he views other people with good-natured equanimity. When Lizzy, this sharp-witted, snappy, utterly unpredictable little French woman enters his life his magnanimous tranquility gradually diminishes, then disappears completely. Jakob’s real world is on the high seas, where the rules of the game are clear and straight, where you must do your job to stay alive. On dry land, in bustling towns, in secluded flats, in tiny love nests, he loses the sense of reality - he has to find his way among hints, allusions, and dubious fantasies. He may be a tough character, but this world, Lizzy’s world is crushing him for sure. Step by step, Jakob’s formerly wellfunctioning life falls apart. He begins to neglect his work, his famous competence and punctuality breaks down. He is made anxious by the thought of leaving Lizzy alone and decides not to return to sea. A sea captain on dry land, a male mind lost in a female mind’s labyrinth: Jakob Störr understands his own life less and less. He wants to find the key for this elusive woman: his own wife. Their unstated duel is fought with words, glances, half-smiles but is more brutal and dangerous than freestyle wrestling. Jakob’s investigation to find out if his wife cheats on him or not brings him to the limits of life and death. We share his point of view, we try to put together the puzzle Lizzy offers him always the way Jakob does. We are duped again and again and have to revise our whole picture of the story as many times as he has to. The twists and turns, surprises, the whole emotional rollercoaster leads us through Jakob Störr’s emotional investigation with the suspense of a good detective story. But in the guise of a seemingly simple story of jealousy, the film circles around something that is a burning secret for every young person of every generation: why we are born with the wish and need for the absolute when what we ever experience is only partial? Jakob Störr’s desperate struggle to understand Lizzy is in fact his brave attempt to understand his own life. The story tells with cruel lucidity but also with true compassion and tenderness a blind, clumsy effort to live a true life.

Ildikó Enyedi is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. She won the Caméra d'or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for My 20th Century and the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival with Body and Soul, also an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. She chaired the jury of the Torino Film Festival 2021.

Director of Photography - Marcell Rév

Editor - Károly Szalay

Production Design - Imola Láng

Costumes - Andrea Flesch

Muisc - Teho Teardo