"Two Lovers"

What a huge disappointment. I had no complaint about the performances, which were all very good, and the tone, though bleak, was consistent. I knew it was a story about a "fragile" man choosing between two women, but the execution was not at all what I expected. I thought it was a maddeningly male view of love - a man who was ditched by his fiancee becomes obsessed with a dysfunctional and unavailable woman while keeping an uncomplicated and loving woman in the wings. The man's fragility is just an excuse to behave foolishly and cruelly, and worse, the three major female characters (the two lovers and the man's mother) are mere prototypes, with no real depth or character of their own. After stringing the kind woman along while he pines after the unavailable woman, he returns to the kind woman when the woman he really wants finally rejects him completely. The kind woman has no idea that he was about to dump her for another woman, that he already cheated on her with this woman, that he's only with her, has only been with her all along, because he can't have the woman he really wants. Many assert that in the end, the man is "choosing happiness," but I think that's a very generous interpretation. He only went with the kind woman when he couldn't have the woman he wanted - is he really going to be "happy" with her now? That seems very unlikely. And what about the woman? She doesn't know him at all - how can she be happy with him? I found the movie to be misanthropic and even misogynist, and completely unsatisfying. (Also, the sex, and especially the nudity, were completely gratuitous.)