REVIEW: Midlife Crisis Meets Ménage à Trois in 3

2011 is turning out to be a strong year for what can only be awkwardly summarized as films about aging hipster couples. That's dire, dismissive-sounding shorthand for what are actually plangent, pensive works about people facing the realization that time is making their carefree choices to forgo a more mainstream path into hard facts.

The years mean you're no longer deciding whether or not to have children, you can't; they make your uncertainty about what makes the right relationship into urgency because you've either been alone or waveringly with the same person for such a long time; they make your continued search for what you want to be when you grow up less and less appealing because, well, by most outside definitions you are grown up. The main works here belong to husband-and-wife filmmakers Mike Mills and Miranda July with their respective Beginners and The Future, and with those you can also group 3, the latest film from Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer and his first in German since 2000's The Princess and the Warrior.

The main characters in 3 are Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper), and they've been together for 20 years without ever having gotten around to marrying -- "Really? Oh, god!" Hanna laughs when Simon tells her it's their anniversary. Hanna, whose default pace is a mile a minute, is a doctor who also hosts a cultural TV show. The more phlegmatic Simon runs an art engineering business, though his fondness for penniless but passionate clients cuts into potential profits. They're a good fit, though they seem to run more in parallel than together, both consumed with their jobs and neither feeling obliged to be accountable to the other about his or her whereabouts. Hence the unfortunate confluence of Hanna running into, unexpectedly spending the day alongside and finally hooking up with a scientist, Adam (Devid Striesow), she met at an earlier professional event, while at the same time Simon discovers he has testicular cancer and is whisked away into emergency surgery alone.

Setting an act of adultery against one of the cuckolded spouse's literal (partial) emasculation makes it seem like an act of notable cruelty, but Hanna's neither calculated nor malicious, just beholden to the moment -- when she finds herself at Adam's apartment for a nightcap, she tries to climb out the window to salvage the situation before things go too far. Rois plays the character as ebullient and appealing while also looking exactly like the 40-something she is (huzzah, Europe!), the kind of woman you'd expect people to describe as "a force of nature." Because she's caught up in a version of her own, she doesn't grasp the introspective crisis into which Simon falls after the successive blows of his own cancer and his mother's sudden, messy death after she also develops the disease, finds out it's terminal and attempts suicide, only to have it go awry. Adrift, he meets a guy at a swimming pool and allows himself to be seduced, having never had an interest in men before, and soon the two are meeting regularly.

That the man is Adam, and that he's unknowingly begun affairs with both halves of a married couple (Hanna and Simon decide to wed, quietly, not long after they've begun cheating on one another) is the schematic, less successful side of 3. In fact, Adam as a character is schematic -- we learn he's divorced, with a son, and that he apparently engages in an wide array of hobbies that conveniently allow him to cross paths with our central couple at times both opportune and not, playing soccer, swimming, singing in a choir, lingering outside the opera in search of spare tickets. But he's still an enigma, more an enabler of the plot than a convincing human, a quality that's magnified by 3's excursions into philosophy via science and art. Adam's involved in promoting stem-cell research to a country with ethical hesitation, and presents it as an obvious step toward the future, away from hampering concerns based in a lack of understanding. "Why is it so difficult to free oneself from repression?" asks a guest on Hanna's show, providing another version of the same sentiments. Are Hanna and Simon heading down a path toward the implosion of their long relationship, or toward something new?

Tykwer, who's next set to make an impossibly ambitious sounding adaptation of Cloud Atlas with the Wachowski brothers, is a director know for his visual inventiveness and style, and 3 has its imaginative moments, though they sometimes seem like attempts to goose up what's actually a fairly talky, cerebral drama. The film's favorite trick is a layered montage in which the screen splits and splits again, the dialogue sometimes overlapping, to show time passing and glimpses of the activities of multiple characters. But it's the smaller bits of whimsy that stick -- Simon's mother appearing as an angel to recite Hermann Hesse's "Steps" to her son, or an old lover of his turning up as his nurse at his surgery -- touches of warmth in what's ultimately more a forward-looking fable than a love story.