If they went to Paris I often wondered what the result would be.
shareI thought about that too after I saw it. They both felt a sense of being trapped in their claustrophobic lives, so they assumed by escaping their unhappiness by relocating, it would solve all their problems. I agree that their problems would surely follow them there.
shareMisery plain and simple.
shareThey'd simply be happy for a while until something started bothering them over there.
Ashmi any question
The following phrase fits them perfectly:
Wherever you go...there you are.
Interesting! I hadn't considered that but I agree with the other posters- their problem wasn't geography. I think she probably would've felt even more trapped eventually.
shareWell, yes and no. I've heard psychiatrists talking about moving as a cure for depression and even though it sounds like a big cop-out, it does work. A new environment, new friends, different job -- it can help people, and has.
Things might have been better for her if she had been out in the workplace, and he was thinking about his life and what he might want to do -- and it could have been getting a similar job in a Paris office, but it's Paris and not where his father worked. I'm not saying that their marriage would have been saved, I don't know. And it could be that with the '50s point of view, he would have felt emasculated because she was the breadwinner. It might have brought out different problems for them. And maybe those problems would have been more workable than what was going on back home.
Nowadays, people do take off and live in places like Paris for a year or so. Back then I suppose it would have been seen as crazy and controversial. She was a dreamer, and she was stuck.
April would have found something to be miserable about over in Paris & Frank would once again get blamed for it.
shareThe problem with Paris was that it held unknown challenges, especially with another baby coming. B/c of the insecurity of those unknowns, the once hopeful choice of Paris turned into a potentially threatening situation. If April was unable to work b/c of the pregnancy & baby, then Frank would not have that "free time" and perhaps he would then feel pressured into finding a worse job?
Now, the challenges themselves could also be a cure/reversal of the painfully empty security of their status-quo existence in Connecticut. There is a malleability to existence that we often fail to grasp and turn to our advantage.
In the end, it wasn't and couldn't be the reality of an actual existence in Paris that matters. What mattered was what Frank and April perceived in the choice to stay or go and how that shaped the decision that was ultimately made and its effect on them.
If they had gone ahead w/ Paris, how they would have conceived of that choice in making it and whether the dialectic of their expectation and the reality of the Paris life was able to become a path forward or drop into an abyss are always unknown. That's why you play the game and don't just work it out on paper.