USA: Chris Rock's latest film "I Think I Love my Wife," a comedy about a man trapped in a happy but unfulfilling marriage, premieres in Hollywood

Comedian Chris Rock's latest film about a married man feeling trapped in a happy yet unfulfilled marriage debuts in Hollywood. "I Think I Love My Wife" is the second film directed by the "Saturday Night Live" alumnus, and this time Rock sticks to a subject he knows firsthand -- marriage. "Relationships are your life, your job is what you do to eat. Relationships are your life, so life is funny," says Rock. "I Think I Love My Wife" tells the story of a successful businessman (Rock) with a beautiful wife (Gina Torres) who finds himself fantasizing about other women often. After running into an attractive old friend of his (Kerry Washington), Rock's character is put to the ultimate test, one that forces him to question his devotion to his wife of seven years. Rock, who is himself married with two children, first had the idea for the film after seeing a 1970s French film about a man who leads a very satisfying home life, but puts everything in jeopardy when he is seduced by an attractive woman, causing him to yearn for the days before he got married. Louis CK, Rock's co-writer on the film and star of controversial HBO family comedy "Lucky Louie," set out to give the film its own voice and instill it with an American-style humor. "'Love in the Afternoon' is the French real title by this guy Eric Rohmer, and there's something about those early 70s French movies, these new wave movies, that are very permanent, they're timeless. And it was really about the most basic possible thing about marriage, and it just really spoke to the both of us, Chris sent it to me, and I saw it and was like if we did this as a comedy, it's great," says Louis CK. Adds Rock: "Yeah it was kind of like they made the chicken, they bought the chicken and I seasoned the chicken." "I Think I Love My Wife" is the most recent comedy on the subject of marriage, following popular TV shows like "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The King of Queens," but the film sets out to be different by tackling the touchier, more trouble-prone side of it, infidelity, with a signature "Chris Rock" style. Certain scenes in the film, including one where two married couples meet for dinner and the wives are friends while the husbands are not, are directly derived from Rock's stand up comedy routines. With most of the cast married with children, it wasn't difficult for Rock to convey to them the subtle humor that can be found in matrimony. "You know, sharing a life with somebody who is at turns very similar to you and at other turns very different from you, if you don't laugh, you're doomed," says actress Gina Torres. Torres' husband, actor Lawrence Fishburne, agrees: "If you don't have a sense of humor about your partner, your husband or your wife, or if you don't have a sense of humor about yourself, you're doomed." Rock's directorial debut was 2003's "Head of State," and he is the creative force behind the hit sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris," loosely based on his childhood in Brooklyn, New York. His humor and ease on the set had co-workers thinking he had directed dozens of films in the past. "It's fantastic," says Kerry Washington, "because I think the director and the lead actor really set the tone for the film, for the set, for the community, and so when you have a comedian, it just makes life so much more fun, it makes coming to work so much more fun, because it's somebody whose job is to look for the joy." "I Think I Love My Wife" releases in theaters in the United States on March 16.

ITN Source | March 16, 2007

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