Another familiar trope that will seem poignant to many people. A man is wining and dining a young lady only to wake up beside an old shrew who gives him what for. The master of this dream/reality narrative is Buster Keaton, who developed it with heartbreaking inventiveness.
This film is not without interest though. Firstly, the dream sequence is excellently imagined, with the couple dining in the foreground and a blank background creating a suitably unreal effect. The symmetry between couples is effective, suggesting that the wife may once have been like this one, asking us to ponder the processes that led to her 'decline', even the possibility of the husband's malign influence. Of course, this symmetry is actually a representation of rupture, division, disharmony - between dream and reality, the ideal and the mundane, the young and the old, the unattainable and the attainable.
The strange thing about the dream is that, firstly, the woman is unattainable in it, she flirts, but she doesn't give herself; secondly, she is dressed in a costume reminiscent of the circus or carnival. Here the dream is something subversive, something that can critique the failures, the repressions, the dissatisfactions of real life. It also points to the use most people make of the cinema, to dream about better lives than our own, lives we can see but cannot have. It is this melancholy vein that helps the film transcend misogyny.