There is a concentrated effort on the part of all others on getting through to Myrtle. Part of the collective effort to arrive at a conclusive reading of the text is to convince Myrtle such a thing is possible; their own livelihoods depend on this but they fail to appreciate the disorientation that so many conflicting perspectives and demands make upon her--that they just add to her burden. These scenes often play like complementary interventions to the one in A Woman Under the Influence. But there is also an effort to bring her back to the proposed foundations of her identity, as though this were either possible or advisable. "Professionalism" as a thing unto itself is vaulted up continuously. But this approach too is not free of pitfalls. Maurice tells her, "You're not a woman to me anymore. You're a professional," without realizing how this only complicates matters further. He fails to see the need to integrate these qualities; Myrtle is not so lucky. Her struggle is predicated upon not caving in, not capitulating, to the easy solutions that so easily snare, seduce and satisfy everyone else because she knows enough to see the falsehood of that, to actively resist it. And yet this way courts madness.
I want to return to this notion of authentic feeling because I really do think that nowhere else in his cinema was JC as concerned, to the point of obsession, with pursuing the relevance of this issue, of how it can ever be known or whether it should matter, of what that notion of authenticity even means. Is the pursuit of these questions itself a solipsistic one? Is it meaningful? Does it change anything? Or maybe it's just something that must be labored under as part of our particular cognition of reality and finally worked through, absorbed, integrated in. So the whole slippery foundation of Opening Night's meta inquiry into "reality" as such is revealed as a quite desperate drive to know these things, to know how they can be known and whether they matter, to learn how to live with the uncertainty. At first, he plays with the question of theatrical reality as a way in (the fact that Maurice actually refers onstage to the massive and obtrusive Quintet style photos decorating the set makes that point). But as the film progresses the seriousness of the inquiry gets more and more clearly grounded in the need to believe in the emotions being put forth, both "out there" in front of an audience but also inside as internalized process, what the performer has to experience first hand. To what degree do actors need to convince themselves that their experience is legitimate? This extends out from the fact that the central text is so uknowable, so very defiant of reduction. But isn't every text finally? Isn't that his point, especially if this is indeed a "bad" play? One thing seems for sure: Myrtle's very particular anxiety about this (and here she must be a proxy for JC) is sustained if not triggered by the idea of material whose unsettling nature does not or cannot define itself one way or the other. I propose that this is the only reason she has to confront the issue of authenticity of feeling, that the issue is brought up and maintained at all. But, alternately, the play may just be lousy and her distress is cast onto it, in which case she becomes the approximation of what is unknowable.
JH: Your questions here allow me to reconnect with how truly slippery this film is...in the same way that the great character roles are slippery, ultimately and only the culmination of a series of performance choices by a particular actor, director. Not only are the characters not easily reducible, but so is the question of what really is "real," as you unpack so well here. In this sense, Cassavetes draws an unexpected comparison to the likes of the great meta-dramatist Luigi Pirandello, who often drew the audience emotionally into a particular unknowable, ultimately unresolved drama, always keeping that hidden, lingering aspect of the constructed nature of it all hanging just above the audience's head, a guillotine-like suspension, ready at any moment to sever the common engagement of willed disbelief from the play at hand. Cassavetes plays that trick in way less pronounced ways here, and adds a playfulness with Time, another interesting aspect of the film that may not present itself on a first pass, or may just come off as frustrating to some. In fact, if you look at it closely, aside from a few connecting elements (the girl's death; Myrtle's bruised eye, for example), many of the scenes don't cue a linear narrative structure in any traditional way, and could operate just as well at some other point in the film. More subtle choices of cutting within the film also reflect that confluence of the Theatrical and the Real, as with the scene where Myrtle visits Maurice's apartment. When Myrtle retreats from their "first take" of the scene, she enters the elevator, and the visual suggestion is that she has left. As the door re-opens, almost acting as a built-in clapper board, we find she hasn't left at all, but rather re-approaches Maurice in a "second take," wherein they move past the romantic tropes and begin to build an understanding about the risks they really need to take, which play out in the film's finale. All this not only elevates the film's effect in that it subtly adds that Brechtian aspect of an awareness of the "seams" or "constructed-ness" of the piece, but also serves as such an accurate representation of Myrtle's emotional state, barely afloat in this swirling rush of production. Cassavetes' sense of editing is so commendable in this respect, in that he not only understood how to tell a story, but how to play with our narrative expectations of how that story should proceed, which is particularly interesting in the context of a film whose title so assertively instills an expectation of linearity. Within "The Second Woman" itself, we are also left with only a few scant clues as to where we are in the play, in terms of linearity, which adds a countering, internal movement of confused time that offsets the overriding, already off-kilter chronology of the film. Not unlike Pirandello's masterwork from the 20's,
Six Characters in Search of An Author, the third layer beyond that is
our own engagement with the film, perhaps tipped off to a meta-level of viewing the film, but simultaneously experiencing some monumental moments of Naturalistic acting, as with that indelible final
"leg shake" scene between Myrtle and Maurice (or, is it more appropriate to say Gena and John?).
 |
| Luigi Pirandello |
I always find this marking between Realist and Brechtian tactics in theatre and film studies fascinating, because regardless of the stylistic technique, the desired goal is usually the same, and it has to do with that idea of "authenticity" that you spoke of. Cassavetes' work seems to re-tread this same path of theater history within his own body of work, with Bookie and Opening Night marking a shift away from his pure Realist roots, but through these new meta-cinematic techniques attempting to discover if he could reach his goal more fully. Put simply, that goal is the same as with all great artists: to reveal something true. As I see it, in the mode of Realism the desire is to produce something that accurately reflects human behavior in as complex and uncompromising a way as possible, in hopes of seeing something that is often hidden from audiences, usually in favor of escapist tropes. In the Brechtian mode, the goal is still to instigate something truthful, but through calling attention to the frame, to the artifice, as a way to connect the idea(s) of the play to the world outside of the theater, ideally. I think you're right that Cassavetes' inquiry into the nature and importance of "the authentic" is profound in Opening Night, made even more so by the way it seems to combine disparate strategies toward a common end.
Or, perhaps, once a director reaches as refined a place as Cassavetes had by the late 70's, the techniques become almost one in the same, in the sense that great Realism
is a valuable tool for examining and reshaping the world in the way that Brecht desired. This brings to mind the acting teacher
Joseph Chaikin's idea of playing against what he called "the big setup" in his influential Open Theater. Chaikin and Cassavetes seem like-minded in the way they both seemed to realize that there were
social consequences to lazy acting that always plays to a predetermined, Hollywood "type." It's worth quoting Chaikin here, briefly (you can easily layer in Cassavetes' voice, if you like):
"My early training for the theater taught me to represent other people by their stereotype--taught me, in fact, to become the stereotype. The actor's study begins with himself. In trade papers, there are calls for ingenue, leading lady, character actress, male juvenile character, etc. The actor attunes himself to fit the type for which he might be cast. He eventually comes to see people outside the theater as types, just as he does for actors within the theater. Finally, a set of stereotypes is represented to the audience. This in turn is a recommendation to the types within the audience as to how they should classify themselves.
All this supports the big setup."
 |
| Joseph Chaikin |
 |
| Cassavetes in The Dirty Dozen |
By the time Cassavetes made his first pictures, he had run head on into the "big setup," from arguing with the studio's portrayal of mentally handicapped children in one of his first shots as a director with
A Child Is Waiting (1963) to playing easy roles in typical Hollywood fare like
The Dirty Dozen (1967), financing his own work in an Orson Welles-like fashion with film work (and a lot of television) that was almost always beneath what he was capable of as an independent artist (with the absolute exception of Elaine May's exceptional 1976 film starring Cassavetes and Falk,
Mikey and Nicky) By the time he gets to O
pening Night he has sharpened his abilities to, at any cost, never subject an audience to those stereotypes under his own name, as to do so would be a disservice to them. Chaikin's goal of a continued "open questioning" for actors reminds me of this later work particularly, even with a film like
Gloria (1981), although commonly considered "lesser" Cassavetes, and for good reason. In
Gloria Cassavetes uses the template of the Cop Movie to continue his deep questioning of female characters with Rowlands, creating a performance that is always eluding the expected choices for how to play "a tough lady cop," and succeeding in a few surprising moments (some of which also contain some of Cassavetes' most substantial attempts as a director of "action" scenes).
Opening Night is especially important though, as you mentioned, because it is the only film that is specifically about actors, and it's almost impossible to fully appreciate Myrtle without looking at Jeannie,
Minnie, Mabel, Gloria, and Sarah as a continuous quest for the authentic, for both Gena and John (you might even throw in her role as Antonia in Mazursky's 1982 film,
Tempest). I fear that Myrtle is seen by those viewers who lean too heavily on the "big setup" to draw conclusions about what a character, or a film, ultimately "is" (as opposed, once again, to just letting it "be") as a troubled alcoholic. Or, as "just crazy," like Mabel Longetti. In actuality, what those characters become are these radiantly complex points of contemplation, and not just for women, but for all of our madness, fears, flaws, and triumphs. This feat of character work across all of his films has created a feedback loop of deep understanding with it's audience that is not only far outside the limitations of most Hollywood cinema, but much of the independent work, some of which you mentioned earlier, that is so often aligned with it today.
 |
| Gloria |
 |
| A Woman Under the Influence |
On that note, I feel compelled to mention that not long after we started this conversation we unfortunately lost the great Ben Gazzara, and I suggest that those who haven't seen it to check out the conversation between him and Rowlands that is attached to the Criterion release of
Opening Night. There is a particular moment at the end of the conversation where the two of them almost laugh off those who have tried to reach the heights that they so confidently achieved with John in their work. It's a moment that might come off as arrogant in any other DVD extra segment, but it struck me as the perfect moment of triumph for Gazzara, as he says of the new generation, "I'm sure there are groups of young kids around town who like each other, work with each other...but not as exciting as
we were." I love that...
groups of kids around town. With that, he pats Rowlands on the knee and forms a sly smile of earned victory.
I don't want to go as far as to say that Gazzara's death is some grand turn of the page in the history of film or acting, but his career spanned an enormous swath of cinema and theater, and in that time we have seen a great decline in audiences that are even interested in the theater, and therefore less able to look at performance and film through that lens. There are other examples of work that "carries the torch," so to speak, and I agree with you that it lies more in the works of someone like Anderson than in the more obvious correlative of the movement-so-hip-that-no-one-wants-to-claim-it, "
Mumblecore" (maybe because the name is so stupid?). Also, I like your comparison to de Oliveira. Although you have considerably more experience with his work, I definitely see the relationship to something like
I'm Going Home (2001), which shares a number of similarities, and leaves a similar kind of space for the audiences' expectations and stereotypes to be drawn into the light. Obviously, there are still serious films and film makers (even within the Neo-Realist independents) but why do we so often find ourselves lamenting the
loss of something like what Cassavetes was able to do? Aren't we in an age that should have taken the lessons of such a great film maker and built upon it, or has the culture lost that sense of value for the "authentic"?
NDC: Ideally the artist as committed professional would seem as sure as anyone to deliver up to us glimpses of truth we can recognize and authenticity that we long to see (though I remember Gazzara saying in one of the supplememnts on the Criterion set that John hated the word "professional" I would suspect that may have had more to do with it being placed in contrast to "amateur"). But the obligation of the serious artist, it would seem, is to acknowledge and to some extent address the irony at issue over any presentation meant to be received as authentic. This doesn't mean that such presentations must be obnoxiously decoded in a Todd Haynes sort of way but rather just that their claims and what they demand of their audience be taken seriously by the artist. This can lead to the sort of emphasis on identity as impermanent or unknowable that occurs in
Opening Night and makes sense given the milieu. The issue is that, ultimately, this is all Myrtle is, all she has; her commitment eclipses her life (which, in turn, may account for the preponderance of images captured in mirrors--lives surrounded by and inescapably trapped in surfaces, not unlike the superb finale of Minghella's
Talented Mr. Ripley).
As the protagonist of Eugène Green's
The Portuguese Nun says, "I'm an actress. I try to show the truth through unreal things." Late in
Opening Night we hear Myrtle's cry, "What do you suppose they've done with us? Do you think they've killed us?" This off screen, on-stage statement is, presumably, a line from the play she is performing but it really doesn't matter as the point is made that this line is just as much part of the life she is living; the lack of certainty as to how to play her role on stage has fully infected and infiltrated her life. The slippage can also be noted in Myrtle's ramblings in the make up chair prior to this performance when we hear her trying to find a fix on her character: "I'm alone...no, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. I've been married. I been with this guy three years." Of course she is inebriated at the time but it's also a perfect expression of an underlying desperation that is always there: the need to fix identity and perspective at some point simply for the sake of basic comprehension, maybe even sanity. In that sense, basic comprehension is all we may be able to hope for. This moment of seeming incoherent rambling, desperate grasping, is also reflective of her larger meta-position in the film itself, representing her adrift state well.
 |
| Leonor Baldaque in The Portuguese Nun |
I love your definition of JC's characters as "radiantly complex points of contemplation". I think that's right; and in being so they are not then just the ideas they represent. In many of Oliveira's films the characters exist almost purely as locations or conduits for the expression of ideas, transition points. But those characters, even when made very literal, are much more constructed specifically for such expression with precious little meaningful psychological reality. Cassavetes emphasis is almost the opposite. He is attuned to the psychic risk involved in committing to a place of lived abstraction and ironic uncertainty but his concerns are more directly about the particular human costs involved in a life lived that way--the dangers of a life all consumed with and defined by one's profession, even if one's art is one's profession.
Myrtle recognizes that there is an underlying violence to the play itself (as she says, "I'm just so struck by the cruelty in this damn play"). That aspect comes across at times as self-punishing on the part of Sarah, the writer of the piece, crafting a refutation to hope or positivity as embodied in a slightly younger self image. And that can't seem all that dissimilar to the fraught relationship Myrtle has with her image of youthful potentiality as embodied in the specter of Nancy. The parallel is hardly likely to go unnoticed by Myrtle, even if just implicitly, and can only add to the friction of her psychic distress. It's not insignificant, too, that we cut directly from the phrase "Let's not phony it up anymore", uttered by Zohra Lampert's Dorothy, to rehearsal for the scene where Myrtle gets slapped. The humiliation of her character in this scene within a scene goes on and on long enough (and here's where JC's approach to time pays off) until it becomes a genuinely unnerving spectacle of ritual abuse. This adds the weighty issue of ethical responsibility into the mix and, by virtue of the scene's alienating nature, provides a starting point for coming to terms with its demands. Of course, the issue of emotional cruelty or cruelty as indifference is already implicitly in place with Nancy's very real death and the reaction or general non-reaction to it; perhaps this is why it acts as instigating element for all that follows--the real truth of how closed off everyone has become is too undeniable to avoid. In the end, this film may be a treatise on the responsibility of the artist. It gives proof of just how serious John was about the validity of his emotional depictions as it makes the unremitting scrutiny of them its entire thesis.
I am far more impressed with Cassavetes' handling of this theme here than elsewhere in his oeuvre; he has demonstrably matured. One of my biggest problems with A Woman Under the Influence, for instance, is that the way Cassavetes frames Mabel's experiences seems like just too much of a stacked deck argument; it seems too defensive to me, way too defensive. Actually, it resonates these days as a rejection of the whole trend of psychotherapy as absolute salvation that was so hugely popular and advanced through pop culture at the time (see everything from MASH to Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman or Redford's Ordinary People). This compromises the picture with an additional layer of grating didacticism. You mentioned that you might have preferred ON with less narrative incident but, for me, it's AWUTI that could benefit from a pruning of the elements.
Myrtle has to contend with the weight of her celebrity as well. When she arrives at the home of the dead girl, apparently during her funeral or wake, one gets the impression that she hasn't bothered to check ahead at all and merely acted on an impulse, albeit a profoundly empathetic one. But in other words she's stuck in her solipsistic world with its demands and its privileges. As someone says to her, "You don't have children. If you had, you wouldn't have come here". In fact, much of Myrtle's behavior can be understood as an indulgence only a star could afford or be allowed (here she is certainly different from Mabel in
AWUTI, a character who is presented to us as a figure of wild, unaccountable action, but one tragically subject to the oppressive dictates of many of those around her--of course, that's also much of the source of my own contention with that picture as I think the presentation itself really does tip into an indulgence of whim). Myrtle being afforded an indulgence, however, does not necessarily diminish the "genuineness" of her struggle or its legitimacy, complicating the scenario in a way that complements the picture's main themes. We see, for instance, in the scene immediately following the wake, that Myrtle is preparing to go on stage in a black mourning veil; the line of distinction is resolutely blurred just as her disconnect from the "real world" is reinforced. The physical altercation she has later with phantom Nancy is another example, presented as it is as exaggerated performance, inextricably theatrical spectacle. And all of this is tied back into that idea of a non-fixed identity (certainly not a mother as she says, "I never had any children. I don't care about 'em.") but also an identity that
is fixed by an obsessive commitment to her craft and the commensurate self-definition, being willfully nothing but a receptive place for shaping or formation. Her concentrated being as performer makes the whole issue of finding some semblance of authentic identity,
something she can comfortably invest in, all the more critical.
 |
| A Woman Under the Influence |
Along with this then, there is also the loss of what was supposed to be--the pure and open expressivity of feeling, rendered up real, direct and meaningful, straight from the source. So much of that aforementioned relationship Myrtle has to Nancy and all that she is made to represent emanates from a place of distance or remove. It's a remove of years but, more than that, it's the gulf between the prospects of hope and pure potential and a certain calcification of time, a settling into rigidity of form (Myrtle's vast, almost empty apartment may suggest a space for receptivity but it's cold and sterile as well--a space fit only to get lost in now). The girl announces herself as Myrtle's youth, yes, beholden as that is to specific themes of the picture, but she is also the pure, undiluted part of herself that evidences a capacity for direct responses and which has neither a need nor an inclination to interrogate itself for authenticity. But Nancy, if taken as a mirror, also reveals Myrtle's propensity to view her profession as authenticated by approval and the acknowledgment of that is bound up with all the rest. Still, Nancy is a portrait of a time that has passed, perhaps inevitably. This may, of course, have something to do with why Myrtle so aggressively rejects Sarah's own presumed definitive meaning to her script and why it antagonizes Myrtle so much, resonates with her so thoroughly. She doesn't want to have to accept this as "reality"--not even Sarah's reality or anyone's. But in that way, Myrtle too evidences an inclination toward resolution, a final descent--however tentative or temporary--to a place of security. Crucially though it's one she determines herself through hard won effort and ultimately is weighed and judged by the contents of its humanity.
There are many filmmakers whose works recall John's or owe him a debt of thanks. But I think they all take very specific things from his influence.
Henry Jaglom is one who has a self-acknowledged debt to JC and you can certainly see it in his work. Jaglom actually remains vividly one of the few genuine American mavericks, having remained true to his style and interests over the decades regardless of their commercial prospects (Jon Jost is another); his films are consistently impressive to me though I know that they evidently alienate many others, perhaps even more than those put off by Cassavetes' own rigorously committed-to aesthetic. Jaglom and his characters (of which he has often been one himself) are probably less appealing because they are not necessarily damaged, vulnerable people with wounds exposed but simply supremely sesitive, overtly self-indulgent types. It may seem odd that I would respond to these characters at all given what I said earlier but honestly what I like about Jaglom is that he and his characters are so unapologetically and indefensibly egocentric; it's refreshing to me, believe it or not. JC, at his best, is far more ambitious. He wants to take his portraiture to the limits of psychological specificity and beyond. He really wants to invent new forms from the foundations of fragmented souls.
Other directors and films take their unique inspiration as well and evidence it in the work. Alan Rudolph has made a career out of hyper stylized dramas that wouldn't seem all that similar to Cassavetes but in specific instances they most surely are (Rudolph's great 1984 film
Choose Me, for instance, is an example of the deeply emotional and personal merged with a high style before that style became, with subsequent works, more ratcheted up and Rudolph shifted to translating his characters' emotional lives purely through their aesthetic surface). Zalman King's erotic melodramas are disdained by many but they share that same commitment to the crucial importance of emotional reality, recognizing it and realizing how it informs all the fantasies. Aronofsky's
Black Swan offers up the spectacle of another overtaxed stage performer sinking into a sustained state of emotional breakdown. Lucrecia Martel's Argentine pic
The Headless Woman, though not a film I particularly like, treats a similar scenario of unmoored discombobulation within a similar class based social milieu. It's a world defiantly determined not to have anything, any nagging doubts or troubling uncertainties, undermine or threaten it. But perhaps the most resonant to
Opening Night's
own themes would be Abel Ferrara's
Dangerous Game, about the only other film I can think of which could match Cassavetes for the intensity of punishing scrutiny upon the subject of performance revealing truth and the meta implications of that; the big difference of course is that Ferrara's film is about film rather than the world of the theater. So, maybe it's fitting to end this particular survey by saying how glad I am that you mentioned
I'm Going Home, as in its own supremely formalist fashion it acts as an interesting parallel to the concentrated emphasis of
Opening Night. It's warning is one less fraught with discordant distress but equally sensitive to the very real risks of living a life of theater.
JH: Yeah, that aspect of de Oliviera's film was what was resonating with me most in relation to Myrtle. I think of Michel Piccoli's aging actor signing autographs on the street, seen from the other side of shop window; under glass, as it were; it recalls Myrtle's suffocating entrapment in the car at the beginning of
Opening Night after Nancy's death, a piece of the narrative that you're right in citing as a crucial "instigating element." Although I am still wary of the payoff in the way Cassavetes plays out the psychological effects of Nancy's death, I agree that the incident itself is essential in evoking the questions central to the film about the "value of the artist," as you put it. This idea also left a strong impression on
Martin Scorsese, who has been very vocal about the unique nature and influence of Cassavetes work, but who also quotes this film directly in the wonderful opening to
The King of Comedy (1983), another film that interrogates that line between celebrities and the people who are obsessed with them. And, certainly, Cassavetes pushes the opening scenes of
Opening Night to great lengths to make sure we understand that Nancy is nothing less than truly obsessed. It is through this depiction of the fanatical (which Scorsese translated into an image that accentuates the religious connotations of that term) that Cassavetes frames his complicated interrogation in
Opening Night.
In terms of the depth of that inquiry, I think Cassavetes succeeds
in creating a complex hall of mirrors within which to bounce those questions around. But, as much as I love Lamphert and Gazzara in that bedroom scene I mentioned earlier, and Maurice and Myrtle's finale where they turn the play "upside down," there are few scenes in the film that connect for me with the dramatic impact of Falk and Rowland's work in
A Woman Under the Influence. I don't really agree that the "argument" of
AWUTI is a defensive one, though I appreciate your perceptive reading of it as such, as always. (Oddly enough, I think one of the latent impulses for us putting
Opening Night in conversation in the first place has as much to do with us discovering a disconnect over
AWUTI.) As we've already discussed, I may be more prone to responding to the pure performance aspects of film in general, and, as with everything, that has something to do with our fields of experience and practice...but
A Woman Under the Influence captures a height of craft that moves me in a way that
Opening Night simply lacks. It recalls for me one of my first posts on ECSTATIC from last year on Malick's
The Tree of Life, which left me a bit cold on an initial viewing because I so missed the wealth of finely crafted, extended dramatic scenes that
The Thin Red Line is just brimming with. As with
Opening Night, I truly admire
The Tree of Life, and have connected more substantially to it on subsequent viewings, but the ultimate questions of the film seem out of balance with the dramatic elements.
Opening Night is a film that is most certainly more interesting as an "idea" picture, but for me Cassavetes is about
feeling, and I have rarely felt like the world has been ripped open to reveal something authentic as I do watching Falk and Rowlands (and Cassavetes mom, and those kids!) play out that, comparatively, rather simple domestic drama. I can understand reading some of the choices in
AWUTI as indulgent, but not anymore indulgent than some of the choices in
Opening Night, and, in my estimation, with a richer payoff. For instance, the final, post-show celebration scene of
Opening Night (with Falk curiously present, as well as Peter Bogdonavich) plays better to a "meta" level of reading the film, but does little for me in terms of emotional impact. In contrast, the tucking in of the children (the way their oldest son makes a fist at Nick!), the band-aid put on Mabel's hand, the "return to routine" of Nick and Mabel in the final scenes of
AWUTI always leaves me devastated. (I won't even get into the "spaghetti" scene!)
 |
| A Woman Under the Influence |
Ultimately, it's Cassavetes' truly compassionate nature as an interrogator of human nature that I think we both respond to so adamantly, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm across different points in his oeuvre. As you've commented to me before about Cassavetes last film,
Love Streams (which, unfortunately, seems similarly as overlooked as
Opening Night), the central force in the film is, simply,
love. Cassavetes was not interested in making a "perfect" film, but rather a film that satisfied him, his questions, his quest for a complex engagement with his public through art, which is what I think we've found so abundantly in
Opening Night.
 |
| Love Streams |
Though the influence of his work is far reaching, and the rather astute connections you made across such disparate films and directors is certainly proof of that, suggesting a few reference points I hadn't even considered (and some I just haven't seen). Particularly, the connection to Ferrara is apt, and reminds me of yet another unfortunately overlooked film,
Go Go Tales (2007), Ferrara's ode to
Killing of a Chinese Bookie. But, among all of those directors, that method that Cassavetes had for setting every character in a spiraling motion around a singularly humanistic world view, which obviously translated so well from his own personality into the films, is utterly distinctive, setting him apart from the pack, at least for me.
In closing, I want to cite another film that has continually come to mind as we've been mulling this film over: Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1953) is the French master's tribute to the Theater, but also a film that marks some new attempts in narrative by Renoir that are comparable to Cassavetes. I hear you making the case, as Eric Rohmer did for The Golden Coach, that it's the "open sesame" for his entire body of work. In the end of Coach, Anna Magnani's Camilla is, like Myrtle, inseparable from her accomplishments in the theater, and the entire narrative set-up is denied by Renoir in favor of that central point. It's funny to discover such resonance between two entirely different directors: Renoir being the "master of mis-en-scene," and Cassavetes behaving, at times, as if he were its mortal enemy. The Golden Coach is also very different in that it's an overt comedy (not that Opening Night isn't funny), but, as Andrew Sarris noted, one that does not rely on convention, "but is based instead on a clear-eyed vision of art's denial of 'normal' life." Likewise, the film was not fully appreciated in its time, failing to create a convincing narrative for critics, which Sarris likened to scorning "Matisse and Picasso for not painting plausible pictures." The final lines of Coach are of the Stage Manager to Camilla:
"You were not made for what is called life. Your place is among us, the actors, acrobats, mimes, clowns, jugglers. You will find your happiness only on stage each night for those two hours in which you ply your craft as an actress--that is, when you forget yourself. Through the characters that you will incarnate, you will perhaps find the real Camilla."
Tragically, gloriously, this is perhaps also the case with Myrtle Gordon.
 |
| Anna Magnani in The Golden Coach |
Once again, thanks so much for taking the time to tease out another great film with me, Nathaniel. I am going to take a cue from your occasional reference to another film maker within this conversation and suggest we move on to Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe in our next installment. I look forward to revisiting that film in the coming weeks, and, once again, viewing it anew with you. Until then!
Coming Soon: "In Conversation" - Todd Haynes'
[Safe] (1995), featuring Julianne Moore
c.jpg)
