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New York Daily News
October 19, 2005
A likable (and very mixed) 'marriage'
by Jack Mathews
Like Andy Hardy saying, “Hey, I’ve got an idea - let’s put on a show,” New York massage therapist Sam Cagnina suggested to his longtime life partner, chiropractor Steven Margolin, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a woman in the relationship?”
“Yeah, it would be great,” Steven said, “but I don’t know how it would work.”
Thus begins the journey chronicled in Susan Kaplan’s fascinating documentary “Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family.”
For 13 years, Sam, Steven and the smart, fun-loving, levelheaded East Indian beauty Samantha Singh lived together as men and wife. They slept together, ran a business together and produced two children - one by the tall, reserved Steven, one by the irrepressible jester Sam.
The documentary fascinates not only because of its subject matter but because the three people - whose backgrounds are individually developed - are so likable, and because Kaplan began filming their relationship in the midst of its best times.
“Three of Hearts” thus catches its family at its most loving, its most reflective and its most fragile. It includes interviews with relatives and friends adjusting to the unique arrangement and captures the feelings of the threesome as it evolves.
The film also takes us along on some neat side trips. We attend a family get-together where the trio performs a very funny mime of a trapeze act, and we follow them to Sam's 20th high-school reunion, where he introduces Steven to his occasionally slack-jawed former classmates as his husband and Samantha as his wife.
The issue hanging over the whole thing, as you watch, is the obvious fact that Sam and Steven are the real lovers in the mix, and that sex with Samantha, as much as they love her, must require extra concentration.
A breakup seems inevitable, and though the moment comes as a shock to two of them, Samantha maintains the optimism that kept them together for 13 years.
While her three’s-company marriage does not end well, she doesn’t rue the experience at all. She has two beautiful kids and is keeping at least one of her two husbands as a platonic friend for life.
And as she reenters the dating game, you are heartened by her chances. Samantha will be an eHarmony jackpot for the Mr. Straight she is now looking for.
