Una donna tutta sola

Moving tale of a middle-class Manhattan housewife's struggle for independence after her husband leaves her for another woman.

The wonderful Paul Mazursky created this 1978 landmark slaute to women's liberation and the film wipes the floor with the messy urban horror of 1977's Looking for Mr. Goodbar: Goodbar's makers ultimately had no respect for their female protagonist but Mazursky scores in his depiction of female self-respect and love.

Jill Clayburg's miraculous performance as Erica was snubbed at the Academy Awards in favor of Jane Fonda's more 'tolerable' female in Coming Home but if you look closely you'll see there's no comparison and Clayburg hits all the right notes while displaying Erica's overwhelmingly complex feelings. Perhaps Erica's unique strength was too much for many male Academy members so they rewarded the typical moony-eyed housewife character instead. Regardless of that, Clayburg makes a brilliant lead and her lonely journey through New York-chic (art exhibits, bars, therapists, narcisstic artists) makes for great viewing. (The very brief encounters Erica has with a handsome blonde man at the coatcheck before and after she's been hit with the news from her husband are a nice touch!) There's a rare level of intimacy between the actors in all of the scenes but especially the girl group talks: the words sound surprisingly like they belong to the actors and Mazursky's ear for dialogue is sharp and refreshingly to-the-point.

Michael Murphy as the wayward husband, Alan Bates as the new love interest, and Cliff Gorman -whom I last saw as the bitchy, effeminate in The Boys in the Band!- as a male chauvinist provide exceptional support as the men in Erica's life. The only thing that marres the beauty of this film is its awful, piercingly shrill, '70's saxophone musical score.

I disliked An Unmarried Woman, starring Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates. Clayburgh's character gets dumped by her philandering husband, of whom she suspected nothing of the sort. She keeps the gorgeous apartment and seems financially fit;something that seldom happens in real life. While wallowing in her grief and self-pity, on her first try she finds the perfect shrink and then her first date is a dashing, sensitive artist played by the dashing, sensitive Alan Bates. I saw this with another recently-divorced woman and we were rolling our eyes skyward throughout the movie, asking the good Lord for patience.

Let's see a movie about a woman without any real marketable skills who gets dumped, with several children to care for, who has to depend on public social services for help? BTW, there's some value in comparing this to the 2005 movie The Upside of Anger, in which another woman, this time played by Joan Allen, gets dumped and, in her case, is left with four teenage daughters. While she hasn't financial woes, the psychological trauma rings far more true than in the self-serving Unmarried Woman.

Why did I give it a 6? The outstanding cast and production teams. Consider it a gift.

Jill Clayburgh gives a brilliant performance as a married wife and mother left for a younger woman. The movie touches all the different emotions felt and her rebirth as an independent individual. The scene in which Erica's husband tells her he has been cheating is great, and when Erica turns the corner and breaks down is really something to see.

This movie was made when divorce was still a hot topic and women were just coming into the workforce and still tied into identifying themselves through marriage. But the film is still relevant today (we all deal with rejection of one sort or another). The rest of the cast is superb and there are great shots of New York circa 1978.

Ten stars.

Briefly, this is one of the few American films I have seen that is remotely a realistic depiction of how basically intelligent, decent, middle-class adults behave in a long-term relationship (in this case a marriage of sixteen years) when they break up. I almost felt as though I were watching a reality show from that era. This is how people behave, without much heroism or great insight into themselves or others; often with a "cluelessness" that defines our humanity more tellingly than our pride would like to hear. (An aside to the previous commenter: I have seen this sort of thing, close-up and personal, and this is pretty much how people act: it reminded me very much of how a couple with whom I was very close broke up, and the aftermath, in the decade before this film was made. And the man had been having an affair for several years before it happened, not just one: the woman had not a clue.) My only complaint is that the story ends far too soon and far too happily. But it is an American film (sigh!), so one most not expect too much: we just "cannot bear very much reality"!

When upon its theatrical release I first saw 'An Unmarried Woman' I thought it brilliantly captured the feminist outlook - not the radical feminist viewpoint but the growing awareness of the vast majority of ordinary women of new modalities for living. I just saw it again on DVD and my first impression of the film holds up. But through my having aged my perspectives have matured, and now I also find 'An Unmarried Woman' to be perhaps the finest capturing of 1977's zeitgeist - but only the zeitgeist of upper middle class New Yorkers (Mazursky better captured the wider 70's zeitgeist in 'Harry and Tonto).

Here Mazursky shows that, whatever else he is accused of being or doing or not-doing (with which I don't always agree or disagree), is a thoughtful director taking a good, long, realistic look at this drama and at more than just its central character. I liked that some scenes ran on for a bit longer than some people find necessary or comfortable, because this is how life's scenes often play out beyond one's wanting them to end swiftly and tidily: indeed, the slight overrunning of some scenes contributes what today might be called "value-added" realism to 'An Unmarried Woman.' After all, Erica has, involuntarily, been thrust into a new life in which she's not at ease in every one of its developing, novel situations.

The saxophone score - probably considered hip in 1977 - is today often more than a trifle annoying; but then it could be said that the score is part of the film's capture of the 70's zeitgeist: like all decades the 70's had its annoyances (not the least of which was the dismal monotony of disco, and all those decor-saturating browns, olives (avocado it was called!), honey-golds, and tawny oranges).

The cinematography here is quite good, nicely tailored to the film's intimate subject, situations, and relationships. Throughout the acting is uniformly good; Jill Clayburgh's effort here is, and will remain I expect, a cinema original and classic. I especially enjoyed - not when I first saw the film but much more so now in 2006 - Cliff Gorman's portrayal of self-satisfied, on-the-make Charlie. Andrew Duncan in the minor role of Bob lends great verisimilitude with his pre-"hair systems" comb-over but especially with the touch of about-to-be-over-the-hill despair in Bob's attempt to bed Erica; Bob demonstrates that most men in that decade, beginning as they were to be flummoxed by emerging liberated women and feminism, still clung to the suddenly obsolescent notion that a divorcée would and should be eager to remarry in order to traditionally assure her security and peace of mind.

At my first viewing I agreed with what Tanya, Erica's therapist, said to Erica about guilt being a manufactured, unnecessary emotion. But a good many more years of living have taught me that guilt is not manufactured, and that without it a person is doomed to emptiness and isolation, and a society is doomed to decadence, and even to barbarism. Rather Tanya should have held that guilt is natural, and that it is one's mature management of it that enables one to distinguish, in oneself and in others, venality and narcissism from generosity of spirit.

'An Unmarried Woman' still stands on its own - more as a socio-cultural than as a cinematic landmark. It's that rare kind of film that's worth watching every five or ten years, if only to help us to recall where we've come from, and to help us to profit from, or to enjoy, a sense of where we might be going.