Defying Film Criticism
The entire generation of critics misunderstood John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence spectacularly. Thus, the people still around were probably too embarrassed to see him again. Behaviorally but visually, the film defies a century of film criticism orthodoxy, screenwriting conventions, and film theory. We are looking at a notion’s representation when looking at a close-up in a film by almost anyone.
No matter how detailed the acting, every hesitation, every shrug, and every wink drives and calculates the narrative forward. From start to finish, we can read his films carefully. One quality that distinguishes Cassavetes’ films from almost all others is the density of detail in their storytelling. We understand it from every motion. In such a way, with very few filmmakers, every breath in the sound era chooses to work.
At least in the fiction realm, there are no rhythm deviations and pauses. The film does not break itself like when Carl Theodor Dreyer becomes a big admirer of Cassavetes. As well as coming to mind breaks down each scene into clearly articulated units. That’s not in disparaging filmmakers with different approaches to art. While establishing a tableau effect that acts into an eerie eternity, it isolates a particular behavioral or visual event.
Mabel Longhetti
It played as the shot’s focal point in digging into the marrow of time for an event beyond duration. Cassavetes’ diehard devotees didn’t help him when they agreed to his statements. His methods allow him to buy into a larger truth than any other filmmaker. Each approach is equally valid; none is superior to the other. Such pretense is easy for us to forgive, as it makes concessions in the hubris in Robert Bresson’s maxims.
He appears in considering how far we go. Each of them will provide particular working methods in archaeological and scientific breakthroughs. The first motion of the film, A Woman Under the Influence, takes the audience through Mabel Longhetti’s commitment. In the next scene, it’s special her homecoming which reads disaster six months later. Different forces come into play in the movements.
Mabel is a central magnet that everyone demands what seems like the simplest thing in the world. But, in the end, it’s impossible. Nick Longhetti is sticking to his image of a lifetime of happiness to become a picture based on carefree memories with his wife.
Going Insane
Perhaps, before the arrival of the children, it blinded him from such predicament. In the film, Nick brusquely insists that everyone is having a good time and is always relaxed and getting along. The portrait of a blue-collar type who uses violence for Cassavetes is insignificant. However, Nick is a man who firmly believes in his idea of perfect happiness. No matter how wrong, he would rather destroy everyone around him than see it as a compromise.
Nick always warns Mabel that he will kill her, again on the verge of madness, and says he will kill the children. The liberating yet terrifying moment speaks to a frustration that most people hide. However, it becomes one of the film’s key moments when an emotional tide breaks but swells. If the audience looks at the film from one end of the telescope, A Woman Under the Influence becomes a woman’s realistic portrait who has gone “insane.”
Her bold appearance in a vaguely working class. It becomes a heartbreaking, soaring, and alternately detailed experience from the other end. Although being in two mighty but long moves, it’s not nearly as strenuous. When tackling films about women with subjectivity, it becomes an activity that is not very useful.
Theaters of War
The film becomes a masterpiece just as impossible as riding on the audience’s mysterious urges, oddities, disappointments, and desires. In A Woman Under the Influence, the children become passive in the first half. It’s exactly what people always wanted. In return, without reservation, the audience can conclude that the responsibilities and inconveniences of children are incredibly life-changing in outright denial.
In the next round, the children protect their mother by stubbornly refusing to shut up. We can also see other characters as Nick’s mother, the annoying outsider. She was more interested in observing the vortex inside and preferred the times when she had to intervene. Incredibly, she becomes another force in the film. It culminates in a marvelous female voice with the delivery of her beautiful but full of stubborn nose.
She shouted that Mabel was crazy in her dignified yet fierce manner toward her son and grandson. In the end, the house in the film is also present as a strength. Cassavetes understands that the staircase in the house is the focal point that domestic drama requires or, in the final shot, destroys expression. With its geography of closed and open spaces, the places for observing and the places where Cassavetes left open became theaters of battle.
Mere Insanity
Nick’s coworkers, as outsiders, looked the other way. Hesitating to scoff or reach out to Nick, he refuses to admit that there is a problem with Mabel. Likewise, Mabel’s father did not understand what Mabel meant when she asked him to defend her. Indeed, Gena Rowlands plays a woman on the verge of madness in the film. The level of imagination and calculation in her acting is higher than her fellow actors.
Peter Falk is in an emotional position where Cassavetes takes advantage of what he perceives as his shame as a human being. When Nick screamed at his mother to chase away the 60 or so sympathizers who had gathered, he couldn’t bear to do it alone. However, Rowlands has more tasks to reconcile the biggest charades with the most direct interpersonal sidelines. Like Love Streams and Faces, Rowlands’ performance is a mesmerizing experience.
Cassavetes makes use of her peculiarities in specific settings. As a presence, she is so understated yet glamorous, with a little expanse in her movements but very detailed. Their relationship would be one of the most complex and greatest screen love stories in cinema were it not for the simple fact that it goes much deeper than mere insanity.
The False Sense of Influence
Cassavetes is one of those unfortunate fools who hands the inmates the keys to an asylum out of a false sense of respect. In other words, we often refer to his film as a prime example of a cinema actor. Katherine Cassavetes, the director’s mother, is a one hundred percent electrifying presence in A Woman Under the Influence. Still, it’s a wonder that people believe in such nonsense.
However, it keeps showing up again and again. Performing a lightning bolt action, Katherine stood with her arms crossed on the stairs. She craned her neck to observe what happened between her daughter-in-law and her son. On one level, we witness something else. Regardless of whether we think of the performance as a better-unified creation, every hesitation, movement, and glance are the exclusive property of the director.
It is at once the center of gravity and the most reliable aesthetic of tool, canvas, and morals. According to Cassavetes, human activity is space for Alfred Hitchcock. He said that the film became a singular achievement subtly. However, it is also a comparative study with Dreyer’s Ordet, where both films are about households. In both films, the house’s layout appears to contain the entire universe.
Dualistic Concept of Reality
The tone is somewhere between subtle and earthy. Like Ordet, the revival concludes the theme of A Woman Under the Influence. In the final sequence, Mabel suddenly returns to clarity after Nick punches her. It’s as if she’s awakened from a trance, and in the end, it violently rips the respective films from despair to a sort of affirmation. However, the film is about war, unlike Ordet. In the scene, Nick and Mabel have a dualistic concept of reality where each is as valid as the other.
It remains the heaviest of all the great American films despite being debatable. It requires dynamics and conflicts that all audiences know. By an uncomfortable measure, the film does not reach a peak of expressiveness where it begins at a fixed expressive level. However, the film does not score any counterpoint by taking in a psychiatric institution. Nothing changes for the protagonist at the end of the film.
With cheerful music, it could be it acts as a love story. Even the title itself, Cassavetes leaves ambiguous, especially the word “influence.” However, one thing is clear: the difference between madness and sanity is mastering the roles we expect to be like anything else.
Bibliography
- Berliner, T. (1999). Hollywood movie dialogue and the” real realism” of john cassavetes. FILM QUARTERLY-BERKELEY-, 52, 2-16.
- Fossen, I. (2011). A Woman Under the Influence. Senses of Cinema.
- Morris, G. (1978). HOLLYWOOD RENAISSANCE. Film Comment, 14(1), 74.