If you haven’t read Christopher Frizzelle’s wonderful, impassioned essay about John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence, you should:
Her name is Mabel Longhetti. She lives in Los Angeles in the 1970s and wears housedresses with big flowers on them. She’s in her 40s, beautiful, a homemaker, a smoker, a tornado of energy. And the moment she runs into the frame—hurrying the kids into grandma’s car to get ready for a night-without-the-kids with her husband—the movie shatters open, pops to life, pulls your eyes in. Mabel is played by Gena Rowlands, the real-life wife of John Cassavetes, who wrote and directed A Woman Under the Influence (SIFF is showing a restored print this weekend), and you can tell that he had access to her in ways usually unavailable to directors. This lady they created together is a freakishly vibrant mammal.
Read the whole thing here. A Woman Under the Influence screens tomorrow, 4 pm, at SIFF Cinema.
