Richard Burton Film Club : Divorce His/Divorce Hers

Director - Waris Hussein
Released - 1973
RB is - Martin Reynolds

A pretty clever idea (the 1^st half is from RB’s perspective, 2^nd same(ish) events from Elizabeth’s) and both of the Big 2 are very believable in the roles and looking good, if both fractionally post-peak – I think this is the last film they did together. The takes where they’re alone and reliving past events are excellent and gripping.

A stream of big problems hold it back though:

it would probably have worked much better if done now to avoid some of the more cliché/cheesy/dated seeming back-and-forth cuts; 

• the actual quality of the copy I’ve got is horrendous, really dated ‘orange dark’ hue to the whole thing; 
• not convinced at all by the “other man/woman” who are bolted on (Carrie Nye is ridiculously slutty in particular), as Warren Beatty says in the commentary for Reds, he needed to find someone it was beliveable Dianne Keaton would cheat on him with - your man Gabrielle Ferzetti as the poindexter she has an insipid "thing" with is not exactly Jack Nicholson ; 
• as its made for TV there’s a cavernous gap in the quality of performance from the starts to supporting cast (Patrick from Eastenders is in a scene with RB(!) and to be fair is far from the worst of the backup players) making it impossible to be arsed with any of the by-numbers filler scenes they’re not both in;
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• and above all else the whole project is so meta-before-meta its very difficult to watch on its merits without reading the real life ‘complications’ into it.  

It is asking a lot to get anyone without some weird, self-created vested interest (ahem) to watch broadly the same hour & 20 again straight after its just finished. If it was up to me, I think I’d have done it as one continuous longish film with the perspectives chopping back and forth, with possibly even some Peep Show ‘what they’re really thinking’ parts. Admittedly, if they’d done that, it would likely be looked back on as a mad decision.

I believe “The Affair” TV series did a version of varying the perspective the storyline was being shown from between the two sides of a romance, and is generally thought of as a good quality effort. So, that could have been another option - if you’re going to do TV, do it properly and go all in.

In an alternative timeline/world maybe ‘Divorce’ could have been a huge career-reviving Netflix series – the secondary storyline of Martin’s business dealings could have worked particularly well in that imaginary version. (Of course, Dominic West is the protagonist in “Affair” and also played RB very well in a TV adaptation of RB/ET reuniting to work together 10 years after this)

Overall - in the form the material actually exists - as ET’s character says, the “end of yet another unsatisfactory chapter” in their latter run of films together, but given the timing/circumstances and constraints they imposed, its doubtful this could ever have managed to get better than 2/5