Una mujer bajo la influencia

A Woman Under the Influence is an emotionally packed film that is centered around a capricious yet troubled housewife named Mabel. Mother to three young children and wife to her loving but volatile husband Nick, Mabel's mind is consumed with gaining acceptance and being reassured by those who surround her. Her psychological ability to keep up with normal everyday situations eventually reaches full capacity and she struggles to maintain emotional and mental competency.

Director Cassavetes intentionally chooses not to grant clemency to the viewer. Imagine walking in late to an opera that's in it's third act – that almost seems like what Cassavetes does to the audience – introducing his depiction of a distressed family while they're in mid flight. Gena Rowlands' portrayal of the likable but frail Mabel is nothing short of incredible, and Peter Falk gives an equally remarkable performance as Mabel's husband Nick. This film is not for the weak-hearted nor for those seeking traditional entertainment. It's distinctive approach to such an emotional journey will undoubtedly impede many viewer's enjoyment - but for those who appreciate unique cinema and realism, it doesn't get much better than this.

Textbook gender related observation: When Jack Nicholson's character acts eccentric in One Flew Over the Cuuko's Nest, nobody will believe he's crazy. When Gena Rowland's character is eccentric in this film, everyone assumes she is.

But that is only one of many realisations one makes observing A Woman Under the Influence. It is an intricate film, as was John Cassavetes a filmmaker who always filled his films with as many things as possible. Whatever his films were about, it always had to do with the truth of human nature and human life in modern society. In one example of great main leads in his films, Cassavetes' real-wife Rowlands is playing Mabel, the woman of the title, the house-wife of a Peter Falk's construction foreman Nick. Everybody knows that Mabel is more or less "crazy". Why does everybody "know" this? She is eccentric, has got funny mannerisms, at time she talks and acts randomly about things that make no sense. She is a human being with a desire to achieve, but nobody has ever given her attention or respect as an individual. I think Mabel's crisis is first and foremost that of an identity crisis. She is empty inside, Nick says. That's because nobody has bothered to look inside. Upon the demanding adult roles society demands on her, in particular the task of motherhood, the result is breakdown. She is a house-wife who spends her days wandering around the house trance-like, she cooks and cleans and sews and all the time she acts as if that somehow would be an absurdity. She tries to be nice to the guests but it all results in awkward silence and embarrassment. What should she be doing, then? Who is she?

I think any viewer judging that she is in fact "insane" is an enemy to the film's intent and soul. Rowlands portrait of this woman is a hauntingly perfect portrayal of mental illness, certainly, but her state is that of extreme confusion rather than being someone who's simply "lost it". This is a woman aimlessly struggling to get out of a sea of under-nourished self-esteem and identity loss. We don't know how or when it started, but the more into the film we get the more we understand. Her mind is like a tapestry that Cassavetes gradually unfolds. In the first scene she is running around trying to place her children in the car for a trip with their grandmother's. Cassavetes knows that the clever viewer will relate the title's "influence" to that of gender related, domestic pressure. But that's only the beginning, I think, of what this woman is suffering from. It's not until the end we realise that maybe her family wasn't all that supportive of her, her father seems genuinely uninterested in whatever any diagnosis could be and her mother is just Mabel's fourth child. And if Mabel is crazy, Falk's character of Nick is certainly just as crazy. We don't realise that until after a while either. But he acts just as random upon situations he's not familiar with, and he also has bursts of eccentric (mis)behaviour. You'll have to look more closely to discover this perhaps, he is after all a friendly looking male patriarch and your brain is less inclined to view him as crazy.

Mabel, who is still dependent on him and her domestic safety (that's the crux, I think, of her entire problem), says "I'll be anything you want" and Nick tells her to be herself. But she hasn't got a personality of her own, her emotions conflict her roles and duties but neither become clear to her. What's worse, nobody is interested in her, or has the slightest notion she might have anything worthwhile. "Be yourself", Nick says, but in fact he's not interested in who she is, and he is (without giving too much thought to it) putting demands on her, expecting her to fulfill her duties which is one of the very reasons she's all messed up. He's just not that clever. It's not just that he is a blue collar guy, he seems totally unable to communicate personally with his wife and, certainly, with his children. Basically, he hasn't got much of a personality either, but being a man that reasoning is considered as abstract and not a psychological case. In any case, Nick and Mabel surely love each other, but none of them have the capacity to cope with one another, or even comprehend their surroundings. Towards the end of the film, all Nick can tell Mabel is "Stop what you're doing". There's a childish desperation in him that is channeled through his gender but just as "crazy" as Mabel's lack of self-confidence and self-realising even.

I said that you observe this film, and I mean it. It is more than realistic, it is profoundly real. Everyone have met couples like Mabel and Nick, couples who's lack of harmony and functionality is so great, it can't stay behind the social curtain. I'm saying that as point of reference. We've all left the dinner table at some point. "Maybe it's time we'd go home". As much as any documentary, Cassavetes films moved in real time, here and now, portraying life as it is. He knew that realism doesn't mean tragedy or brutality. Life is rarely dramatic and offers no cathartic finales. Life just is what we are living, it's not easy to comprehend and it doesn't offer security. For the future, we feel great hope but we also feel great fear. This film has got horrible moments, but it's horrible moments of truth. It's also got humorous moments of truth. These judgments are in a sense arbitrary. It's real life. It's the rarely seen beauty of truth that Cassavetes conjured up in his films. Rowlands is there to capture the essence of it, the notion that we are all human beings who need and deserve to be loved, no matter if we have table manners or not.

This movie is a breakthrough - courageous and uncompromising view at the family and at the marriage where both spouses love each other deeply but they are both not well, they don't know how communicate when somebody else present, even their own children. They could be happy on the deserted island but not surrounded by friends and families. I was fascinated by both, Peter Falk's and Gena Rowlands' performances. She looked like a little girl, trapped in a woman's body - confused, insecure, listening to what is inside of her. When she said to her children, "I hope that you will never grow up", she meant it because she never felt comfortable as a grown up. I could not take my yes off Rowlands. Her performance is on par with the best study of nervous breakdown I've seen, and this is Liv Ullmann in Bergman's "Face to Face".

Peter Falks was also a revelation - I love him as Lt. Columbo in the TV series but he is a completely different character here; in a way, he is as mentally unbalanced as his wife is. The fact that he loves her but never hesitates to abuse her makes him terrifying - you never know how he will act in the next moment, and he does not know himself. Directing and writing are absolutely first class, and I am very exited to see more films by John Cassavetes, the Godfather of American Independent film-making and a father of American "New Wave" 9.5/10

This is just another confirmation that Cassavetes, along with Dreyer and Tarkovsky, is one of the very small number of geniuses in film, whose every film is an extension of their genius -- some more mature than others, but impossible to be "bad"; they are beyond terms like "good" or "bad" -- they are the great art works of the century.

This film isn't about a "crazy" lady; it's not about putting a woman in an institution; and it's not about people talking about your crazy wife, though all of this happens in the film. Those are merely the events that take place over the course of the film; what it's really about is our misunderstanding, our experience as an audience. Just like the characters, we misunderstand Mable's childlike actions. What Cassavetes does is turn *us* into children -- it's as if we're experiencing things for the first time all over again, because it's a totally new experience, the same with watching a movie like "Andrei Rublev." That is an amazing thing to pass onto an audience. That's why I've never been bored watching a Cassavetes film -- something is always happening, things are always changing. The reality of what we're seeing is always undergoing augmentation, so we can never get fully situated.

It's never unrelenting gloom the way many so-called realistic films are (and this film goes far beyond mere "realism"); it's devastating watching it, watching Mable ask people if they want spaghetti one by one. But it's loving when Nick jokes about someone hugging her too long. It's communal during a scene at a dinnertable where Mable takes a pride in feeding "her boys." But each scene goes through a transformation as it happens. When Mable goes home with another man, he makes it clear that he's not to be used, but also that she shouldn't punish herself. It's not a screamy moment with a woman hiding in the bathroom; his avuncular twang is disarming.

There's a complete lack of self-consciousness in the film, and I mean that in terms of the characters (during Mable's key freak out scene, Rowlands does, I think, go too far) -- that's why the kids are s terrific in the film. When a boy says, "It's the best I can do, mom," it's an incredible moment because it's managed to be included without being offensive, mugging for the camera with cuteness. The film has such a strange relationship with kids -- they're like little people. And if that sounds odd, you'll understand when you see the film. The characters are constantly changing their minds; they're so aware of themselves that they're unaware -- Mable doesn't realize she's giving off a sexual aura (despite the fact that Rowlands can at times look like a blond beach babe). As with Julianne Moore in "Safe," we don't know what's wrong with her. She's a frenetic, guideless woman trying to do the guiding.

The way Cassavetes sets up the film, with ominous piano music that comes in when Falk is trying to speak, blinded by frustration; or setting the film inside this house with gigantic rooms, makes everything feel larger and emptier at the same time. It's like the scariness of the echo of something you'd rather not hear. Someone said that they wouldn't want a single frame of "2001" to be cut, lest the experience be changed. I think that applies more aptly to Cassavetes' films, because he never treads over the same thing twice, even when he's doing exactly the same thing he's just done. It's always something new. 9/10

Eeesh, what a tough movie to sit through.

This two and a half hour movie left me sweaty, exhausted and hollowed out. In its own way it's an extremely well done film, but I don't know that it's an experience I want to repeat. Director John Cassavetes follows a few months in the life of a family whose mother and wife (Gena Rowlands) is suffering from mental illness, and the movie consists of one long scene after another of her cracking up, or trying not to crack up, and the various family members' reactions to her cracking up. Peter Falk plays the husband and father who thinks that mental illness is just some silly nonsense his wife should be able to stop if she just tried hard enough. Rowlands has the showier role, but Falk is the revelation here. His depiction of a husband who blusters and shouts to hide his overwhelming sense of helplessness and fear is superb.

Cassavetes's camera is relentless. We watch Rowlands suffer again and again in long takes and intimate closeups. There are times when you simply want to look away from the screen to help this poor woman preserve a shred of dignity. The highlight of the film (or low point, depending on your point of view) comes when Rowlands's character returns home from a stay in an institution, and her family works overtime to convince themselves that everything's fine when the audience can see clearly that everything is not.

Bruising is the best word I can think of to describe this film.

Grade: A-