I Do is the first dud of the festival. It looked good on paper, and was pleasant enough to watch, but I found it preachy and uninspired, and overally very forgettable.
Ten years ago, Jack’s brother Peter was on top of the world: he’d just gotten his green card (they’re both British, having lived in the States since they were teens), and his lovely wife Mya was expecting; but later that night after a celebratory dinner he was run over by a car in full view of Jack and Mya. Since then, Jack has become a surrogate father to his niece and a quasi-husband-type-person to Mya and has focused pretty much all his emotional energies on supporting them. He used to be an avid photographer but now is employed as an assistant in a photo studio, repairing cameras and so on. He has little time for relationships, instead hooking up with fuckbuddies from time to time.
Then out of the blue, two things happen: Jack’s visa is about to run out, and due to new rules put in after 9/11 there’s no way to renew it in time. He wants to stay and help take care of Mya and Tara, but how? The only option is marriage, and that has to be to a woman. Even though same-sex marriage is legal in New York State, it is not recognised by immigration law. His sister-in-law—the first logical choice—will have no part of it, since it might lead to jail time if authorities found out the fraud. His next choice is his lesbian BFF Alison, who agrees.
Around the same time, he meets someone at a gallery showing: Mano, a suave, urbane, intellectual Spanish-American architect, and it’s love at first sight. But their budding romance is complicated by Jack’s need to maintain his straight masquerade, and his constant running off to take care of Mya.
Eventually, Alison gets spooked from repeatedly dealing with Immigrations and their questioning, and sitting home alone every night while Jack is gallivanting off with Mano, and asks for a divorce. Coincidentally, Mano has to return home to take care of his ill father. He invites Jack to move to Spain with him—they could even get married!—but Jack wants to stay in the US with Mya if he possibly can. In the end he can’t, and he accepts that he needs to live for himself instead of for Mya, so he moves to Spain to be with Mano. The end.
I think part of the problem with I Do is that it tried to shoehorn two different stories together: a political one, about gay marriage in the US; and a personal one, about Jack’s relationship with Mano and their respective family responsibilities. The rest of the problem is that neither of the stories were that engaging to begin with. The romance storyline was uninspired and by-the-numbers, and the gay-marriage storyline was clunky and preachy. I guess it tried to send a Big Message about love and how it must be respected, but it just seemed to be trying too hard.