In the second installment of FIB’s Cult Classics Watch List we uncover John Cassavettes’ heart-wrenching portrayal of domesticity, love and madness in his 1974 flick, A Woman Under The Influence.
Gena Rowlands stars as Mabel Longhetti, a woman unsure of who she is other than a mother and a wife and unsure how the hell to be either of those things. Coming at life from all angles, she tries to find herself whilst wishing someone could do it for her, telling her husband: “I’ll be whatever you want me to be, Nick”. Mabel acts strangely, but always with love, obscure but not dangerous, unstable but not insane. However, the confines of her structured, close-minded society, dictate that she is crazy, or so she is perceived to be. Torn from her family and put into an institution at the hand of her well-meaning husband, Nick, we follow Mabel before and after her rehabilitation and in the interim, learn about Nick.
Nick Longhetti is a municipal construction worker, a husband and a father. He is loving and accepting of his wife’s eccentricities whilst also being destructively embarrassed by them. Unafraid to slap his wife in front of his friends or yell down her throat, Peter Faulk manages to embody love in these hateful actions. It is as though he knows it is his role in society to keep his woman tame and he does so with so much sadness that one almost becomes sorry for him, for he, too, is trapped in societies expectations of him.
John Cassavettes is a master of human nature. Honing in on real and honest characters, seeped in faults and contradictions, his film taps into the sometimes volatile instincts of human nature and our learned social ideologies. Being also an actor, Cassavettes was clearly influenced by character driven work, with most of his films being heavily character oriented. Intuitive and always carrying an air of spontaneity, Cassavettes created a space which freed his actors, allowing them to experiment and which ultimately provided some of the most realistic portrayals in 20th century film. Gena Rowlands won an Oscar for her work on the film and both Peter Faulk and Cassavettes recieved nominations for their roles (actor and director).
At the same time hauntingly sad and beautiful is the connotation that every action (in the film and in life) is carried out with love and a desperate, all encompassing desire to fit in. Nick’s rage boils and festers when he desires most to be happy. Clutching onto an image of happiness and family values that he perhaps saw in movies or heard in stories, he consistently screams at those he loves to “have a good time!!!”, anger rising in his voice. And Mabel? We see her happy when playing with her kids, probably the only people to truly love her for all her supposed madness and eccentricities.
A Woman Under The Influence is an exploration into the influences of those around us, social constructs that define us, and the roles of parenthood and domesticity we submit to. Nick and Mabel’s home becomes a battleground and in it, everyone is a casualty…
