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National Post
September 11, 2004
Documentary on three-way relationship generating T.O. film festival buzz
by John Mckay
TORONTO (CP) - Those still struggling with the concept of same-sex marriage, beware. Three of Hearts, a compelling new feature-length documentary eight years in the making and debuting at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, throws a bigger, fatter monkey wrench into society’s preconceived notions of what constitutes a marital relationship.
Not that Sam, Steven and Samantha had any intentions of busting all the rules and exploring uncharted territory with their three-way commitment.
And rest assured it was much more than just a menage-a-trois. They liked to call it a “trionogamous” marriage. This trio of young Manhattanites quite simply fell in love with each other, decided to set up house, have children and do their darndest to make it work.
What they didn’t expect was that their imaginative new combination would face the same pressures that send traditional couplings toward rocky shoals.
The reason we now know about all this is that they had a longtime friend in Susan Kaplan, who happened to be a documentary filmmaker and was allowed to tell their story.
“I started in 1996 and then finished the film around the year 2000 - thought I had finished the film,” Kaplan explains, adding that while in post-production she heard there had been some developments in the relationship and returned with her cameras for nearly four more years of shooting.
Here’s how it began.
Sam Cagnina and Steven Margolin were gay lovers who agreed that it would be interesting to find the right kind of female to join their relationship. Enter Samantha Singh, a Toronto native. Sam and Samantha were legally married, and then they held a “commitment ceremony” that included Steven.
“Like everyone else who knew them well, I believed in their relationship,” says Kaplan. “I wanted to probe deeper and deeper into their psyches to understand the choices they made.”
Then they decided to have a baby and that’s when things got really interesting for Kaplan’s documentary.
A funny thing happens to audiences when they watch her film. There’s a tendency to root for this likable trio when the “marriage a trois” encounters problems - a tribute, perhaps, to the filmmaker’s storytelling abilities.
“I never wanted to say this is what people should try,” she says. “It was just pushing the idea of family to its limits and feeling like ... if there was anyone who could make it work, it was these three people.”
Samantha, who has joined Kaplan to make the festival rounds while visiting her relatives in Toronto, feels it’s a wonderful film.
“It’s my life, it’s like watching my life before me,” she says. “It’s watching my love story that was in the past ... and then to watch the hope of the future and feel really excited about what is to come next.
“Hopefully at the end they (the audiences) do see the hope that is to come and it ends on a happy note.”
Both Kaplan and Singh agree that the presence of the filmmaker and her camera in their midst over all those years did not become a factor in the evolving relationship, despite assumptions the detailed recording of events in their lives might prompt them into a more careful analysis of their feelings and actions.
“I believe there was a wall maintained there,” says Singh. “I don’t think that it intruded in any way.”
Kaplan says she hadn’t heard of the 1980 film Heart Beat, an imaginative take on a supposed similar relationship in the 1950s between beat-generation author Jack Kerouac (John Heard), Neal Cassidy (Nick Nolte) and Carolyn Cassidy (Sissy Spacek).
In that film the characters argued that they had done nothing wrong, they had just done it first. But their three-way household crumbles when Kerouac’s book On the Road takes off and he starts to become famous.
Kaplan agrees that it sounds like an interesting parallel.
