Ainsi va l'amour

Zelmo says "people that listen continuously are much more interesting than people that talk continuously" He doesn't get the girl. Seymour says "I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom." He gets the girl. "When I'm with someone I want to get away." This is the girl speaking. Her name is Minnie . She also says "I don't like men. They smile too much. You see a lot of teeth." This is no ordinary love story. Correction this is an extraordinary love story where Minnie ultimately becomes a Moskowitz which is difficult to say with a straight face. But the ultimate romance is between John Cassavetes and the English language. Forget the popcorn, to eternally enjoy Minnie &Moskowitz, have a notepad and some shorthand and "if you have bread, we can make toast."

This is an incredible achievement for John Cassavetes. Not only has he made an outstanding screwball/romantic comedy, but he has also made a deep and biting attack on the way we let the movies(and also our culture) shape the way we see the world. For those of you who are seeking a love story, Cassavetes provides an extremely lovely one. The rules of the screwball genre are strictly followed. A man meets a woman, they are an impossible match in terms of personality, they try to fall in love, then comes the inevitable 'hiccups' in their relationship, and last but not least, the happy ending. But, as has always been the case with Cassavetes, that is only a very small fraction of what you'll get. He obviously has got a lot more to say. The 'surface' story is not the only story here. Beneath it lies another 'story'. And I don't think the other story will ever get past you unnoticed. The real story here is a 'cultural' one. It is a biting attack on the way we let movies and our culture influence our way of seeing the world. How does he present this attack? Well let me give you an example. The other day I watched this film with a friend. He made quite a few comments but the most striking one was when he complained about how is it that someone as unattractive as Seymour Moskowitz could get a woman as pretty as Minnie to like him(when you see the film you'll see). Now that is exactly the kind of attitude that Cassavetes is attacking. Why must everyone be 'handsome' or 'good looking' to be able to get a girl to like him? Minnie will constantly say to Seymour in the film that, "That's not the right face. You're not the man I'm in love with." It's a subtle attack but no less powerful. There's even one instance where Minnie, while in conversation with her friend, talks about movies as being a conspiracy because "They set you up. And no matter how bright you are you still believe it." This is a shining example of the fact that it is not enough to just recognise the problem, because it doesn't mean anything until you do something about it. There's a lot more, but I don't think it will be fun if I talked about everything. Part of the thrill of watching a movie like this is figuring it out. So I'll just talk about the 'surface' story a little bit more. A lot of people has called this movie 'earnestly real'. But don't be put off by that because like this world we live in, it's not all grim and grin. This isn't a Ken Loach film. While Cassavetes definitely does show us how ugly the world really is and can be, he has got enough insight to also show us that life can also be wonderful. I can give you a lot more examples, but I think it's best if you discover them for yourself. My comment here does not do justice to the movie. There's too much for me to say. And I don't think the space here allows it. So just go and see the movie. It'll be worth every minute.

Minnie and Moskowitz is the most pathetic and ungraceful love story I've ever seen. Between Minnie, a disillusioned museum curator whose abusive married boyfriend dumps her and leaves her even more uptight and confused than she already was, and Seymour Moskowitz, a parking attendant so desperate for attention that he spends his nights going to bars and restaurants aggravating people, there is a chaotic and disenchanted match from the start. Just like so many pairings that we see every day.

In nearly every love story, there is a man and a woman, the man being confident, funny, either classically hot or attractive in his own way, whose shortcomings are charming, and the woman a wounded soul who could have any man she wants who chooses this guy because there's just something about him. These movies make everyone feel so good because the characters embody what every man and woman wants to be, not what they are. Minnie and Moskowitz, instead of indulging in any hint of fantasy in the realm of romance, depicts people who may just be more common than the attractive, confident people with so much experience playing the field. What's the story behind the love affairs of the ugly, alarmingly awkward man with no life and no job that we all run into, or the woman so crippled by insecurity that it's difficult to talk to her?

This film is not as fascinating as Cassavetes's Faces or Opening Night, but it has that riveting quality that Cassavetes always fought so hard to render, which is an unbridled depiction of people underneath the ego that hides behind itself in nearly all other films. Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, delivering startlingly pitiable people, are hardly likable. Moskowitz nearly drives us mad, let alone Minnie. He imposes himself so forcefully in her life, the dates are an explosion of the inner voices of ours that respond to the screamingly inept uneasiness on dates we've all been on, rejections we've all swallowed, and arguments we've all had that we know were our own faults. I admire a film like Minnie and Moskowitz because, as the trademark is with the films Cassavetes helmed himself, it identifies with us in 100% honesty. Our egos play no part in company with his characters, thus a tremendous achievement per performance by actor.

One of John Cassavetes' greatest films is also one of his least known. He made it in 1971 and over the years it has been largely forgotten. I've seen it described as a romantic comedy and even as a screwball comedy but I found it very disturbing. It's not a comedy and I'm not even sure it's a love story. It's characters are all dysfunctional, unhappy people and Minnie and Moskowitz are the most dysfunctional of all.

She works in a museum and he works as a car-parking attendant and the film charts their hit and miss relationships, with each other and with other people. It is also largely improvised which gives it the feeling of life being lived in front of our eyes rather than simply being played out but these are people you definitely wouldn't want to know or maybe they aren't people at all but just extentions of Cassavetes' off-the-wall imagination.

It is magnificently acted by Cassavetes' repertory company of friends and family though at times it feels more like a series of classes at the Actor's Studio. Gena Rowlands is Minnie and Seymour Cassell is Moskowitz and they are superb as you would expect as indeed are everyone else, particularly Val Avery and Timothy Carey as men having meltdowns in restaurants and an uncredited Cassavetes as an unfaithful husband, while the cinematography of the three credited cinematographers, (Alric Edens, Michael Margulies and Arthur J. Ornitz), gives the film the documentary-like look the director obviously intended. This is independent cinema at its purest and most unrefined; scary, moving, rarely romantic. Just don't call it a comedy.

Step the third in my journey through Cassavetes..

Here, he takes one of the most popular movie formats, the romance. Boy- meets-girl in LA, under the lights. But she is no cool femme fatale, she is fragile, unsure of herself. He is no Bogie himself; as the film starts he is watching The Maltese Falcon in a theater, a scene where Mary Astor throws herself crying on Bogie's feet. Trying to pick up women afterwards, he's chased out of bars, looked at as a weirdo and beaten up in an alley.

The idea is that we are not going to see movie people, but real people on the street. That was the ambition anyway, a situation aggravated by Cassavetes' actorly Studio background—as in Husbands, we have constant shouting matches, awkward intrusions, obnoxious pulling and nervousness. He seems to think the room inhabited by these characters won't feel real and lived, unless we have damage on the walls, a Greek sensibility, after all the main story recasts Zorba.

So unlike a Bogart film, the actors here don't coolly glide off each other, they cut themselves on each other's edges.

The same situation develops here as I described in my comment on Husbands. The edges, the damage are unusually pronounced, by this I mean a situation like when Moskowitz almost runs her over with his truck to get her to go with him takes me out of it. A softer next moment will pull me in again, until the next hysteric one and so on.

Which brings me to my main discussion about presence.

Moskowitz is the kind of character who can be likable once you get to know him, the sort of bond you form with coworkers that greatly depends on shared time. Minnie is warm when we first see her, but there's a haughty, nervous ghost in her. It is, let's say, a truer to life perception than the immediately charming Bogarts and Stanwycks of old. It requires work to take them in, giving space.

That narrative room, that space where characters wreck themselves and things works the same way once you excise the shouty moments, simply wonderful. None of the individual visual moments are cool or typically beautiful. The locales are drab and mundane. The light and textures all natural, the whole is imperfect but breathes. In this, he equals Pasolini, another master of the living eye.

So on a moment-by- moment basis, the space is like the characters, intensely present flow to undefined horizon. In a movie like the Maltese Falcon, the narrative horizon is immediately defined (get the bird), and again defined in every scene (get out of there, rough someone up, etc.) so we are at all times comfortably tethered, enjoying the play. What Cassavetes does matters in the long run in the sculpting of the overall effect, it doesn't leap to attention.

Like Husbands, this slowly starts to work for me once I have a narrative shift that faintly, very faintly defines a certain horizon in the story—here marriage. Cassavetes is work, because this happens so late in the movie, the bulk of it is like staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration, or waiting for musicians to tune their instruments. Here, that shift happens about 9/10ths in the film, and then we're through that and a new horizon opens, the closing shots of family life and then it's over.

So it starts to work late but extends for me to long after it's over, it's one of the most haunting effects I know, transcendentally marvelous; more on that in the next comment on Woman.