The New Confusion
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen THE NEW CONFUSION BY ROBERT ASAHINA T *JL. here is an old tale about how comedians carry on at a gagmen's convention: Instead of trading jokes or even punchlines, they make one another...
...Although it is nice that she is finally winning the favor of both audiences and critics, it would be unjust if An Unmarried Woman proved her big break...
...He is equally unaware that he is patronizing her by making her seem kooky, in a cute way...
...In Blume in Love, a husband discovers that he really loves his wife, but only after his marriage breaks up on the rocks of his infidelity...
...This studiously open-ended ending—neither conventionally happy nor conventionally downbeat—surprised me...
...Another is Annie Hall, whose appeal rested largely on Woody Allen's ability to ingratiate himself with his upper-middle-class, college-educated audiences by flattering them with familiar references...
...Yet another drawback is Bill Conti's score, featuring one of those irritatingly repetitious themes that sounds as if you've heard it a million times before—the first time you hear it...
...And had Mazursky meant these lines to be funny, they would have provided evidence of a good ear for satire...
...Since Erica takes this banal advice and thereby finds happiness, one must assume that it is intended seriously...
...Neither satire nor easy laughs are really the point here, though: Mazursky simply wants to trigger a series of familiar associations...
...Alas, it turns out the therapist is played by a real-life practitioner, Dr...
...Penelope Russian-off...
...Some of his sycophants sec his confusion as "mixed moods...
...Come on . . . get in the stream of life...
...The lip-service paid to liberation notwithstanding, the protagonist's spiritual fulfillment consists mostly of finding a new Mr...
...That was also a better movie...
...To be sure, Mazursky does make some obligatory gestures toward feminism, other than the one at the end...
...One sequence, for instance, is joined by "linkage," in the fashion of V. I. Pudovkin: Saul, like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthal-er, stains a canvas by dripping paint on it...
...She was much better in Semi-Tough, where even her swearing sounded more authentic...
...After 16 years of marriage, Martin (Michael Murphy) abandons his wife, Erica (Jill Clayburgh), for the proverbial younger woman...
...At first, 1 thought the director was lampooning a particular brand of psychology that is little more than the bastard child of faith healing and snake-oil salesmanship...
...Like Allen, Mazursky in his writing and directing uses (he cinematic equivalent of those jokcsters' verbal shorthand to evoke comfortable associations...
...Likewise, when Blume is reunited with his wife at the conclusion of Blume in Love, are we supposed to laugh or cry when the violins swell...
...In fact, the movie resembles Blume in Love, except from the distaff perspective and with a suitably feminist close: Even though Martin finally sees the error of his ways and tries to come back, Erica spurns him because her so-called consciousness has been raised in the interim...
...And in Next Slop, Greenwich Village, an aspiring actor leaves Brooklyn for the Village, loses at love, but manages to win a shot at a Hollywood career...
...Bates is a liability to Clayburgh in a different respect...
...presumably she did not intend to make a fool of herself...
...Don't be afraid...
...The title should be changed to An Unmarried Woman and Saul Kaplan...
...Worse, its Muzak-like quality reminds us how slick and familiar the whole movie is, and we certainly don't need reminding...
...Unfortunately, in context, they are clearly to be taken just as seriously as his sappy romanticism and his pseudoprofundities about the meaning of life...
...Click...
...I have been rooting for her ever since I saw her in an episode of the television series A7...
...Upper East Side by way of Vassar...
...a decade ago...
...In Harry and Tonio, an old man is evicted from his home, but finds new meaning in life when he undertakes a cross-country journey...
...Initially, she appears to be reeling drunkenly across the screen...
...I wonder why men in movies are never pictured as "free spirits...
...We know what will follow, and it does: a tirade about city filth directed at the passing cars...
...Again, after the lovebirds spend a romantic night together, there is a quick cut from the two of them in the dark studio to her alone in the bright sunshine (the next day, one hopes...
...Mazursky's pictures are based on one formula: The main characters suffer temporary psychic dislocations when their settled, conventional lives are disrupted...
...This movie is no better...
...The story is one example of the jaded substituting for the genuinely funny...
...When the lour decide not to indulge in wife swapping, they abandon their hotel suite to the strains of "What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love...
...Urban paranoia...
...She fantasizes that she is a ballerina and dances around her apartment in her underwear, to the music from Swan Lake...
...Nevertheless, Mazursky has her utter the following platitudes with the utmost gravity: "Guilt is something I get livid about, because it's kind of a man-made emotion...
...Was that supposed to be funny...
...But if there is any purpose in juxtaposing these two shots, it escaped me...
...Unlike Allen, however, who often fails to suppress his impulse to go for the belly laugh (no doubt a hangover from his experiences as a standup comedian), Mazursky is more subtle and has thus gained a reputation as a satirist...
...The rest of the cast doesn't give her much help...
...The suggestion is that she will continue her pursuit of the holy grail of self-fulfillment at her menial job in an art gallery...
...As they sit at the piano, the camera—in what 1 take to be a bow in the direction of Antonio-ni—slowly pans to reveal the empty living room beyond their shoulders...
...Most of our viewing pleasure was meant derive not so much from the jokes—they weren't very funny, anyway—but from situations he set up: waiting in movie lines, browsing in bookstores, boiling lobsters...
...Mazursky the screenwriter made a big mistake in creating three wooden Indians for Erica's female friends: an alcoholic manic-depressive, a middle-aged seductress of teen-aged boys ("The worst that could happen is that his parents will find out"), and a socially retarded former radical ("These old bones have known plenty of pain...
...Don't feel guilty about feeling guilty...
...Trendy Upper East Siders...
...Click...
...In the opening scene, Martin and Erica are jogging along the FDR Drive, and he accidentally steps in a pile of dog manure...
...ML...
...Was it the same evening...
...Other than as a purely technical exercise in editing, the insertion of the daylight shot is utterly arbitrary...
...as the colors run together, there is a quick cut to Erica stirring a couple of eggs in a bowl for Saul's breakfast...
...As the camera pulls back, we see that she is rather clumsily ice-skating across the rink at Rockefeller Center...
...I would like you to take a vacation from guilt...
...Over-reaction to minor external stimulus as symptomatic of inner turmoil...
...Then I remembered that ambiguity itself has become a convention (as in Saturday Night Fever), and that leaving matters unresolved raises the possibility of a sequel...
...here is an old tale about how comedians carry on at a gagmen's convention: Instead of trading jokes or even punchlines, they make one another laugh simply by calling out a page number from a standard joke-book they all use...
...Finally, after Erica has Saul spend what turns out to be a disastrous evening with her 15-year-old daughter (played by Lisa Lucas in a manner that makes you want to punch her in the face), there is a dissolve to a scene where mother and daughter sing an off-key duet...
...What happened to Saul...
...The two couples in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice flirt with a swinging "lifestyle" after they sample the temptations of West Coast hedonism, but true romance eventually triumphs over empty sex...
...Consider the ending of Bob& Carol <?Ted A Alice...
...He doesn't even appear until over an hour has passed, but he is such a ham—he establishes a new record for eyeball-rolling and eyebrow-twitching—that he steals the rest of the picture from her...
...An Unmarried Woman is plagued as well by the uncertain grasp on the material that has been apparent in all of ihis filmmaker's work...
...I see only the confusion...
...ultimately, of course, the two are reunited...
...I would have gone home a long time before then, but I was somewhat distracted by Jill Clayburgh's performance...
...An Unmarried Woman trods the same safe and sentimental path...
...Erica proclaims to Martin: "I was your hooker...
...But no, Saul proves himself a true Prince Charming by defending Erica's honor (!) at a cocktail party and then by laughing at himself upon stepping into a pile of dog manure—a clumsy character contrast with uptight Martin...
...It never occurs to Mazursky that he is insulting Erica in suggesting that her problems with one man can be solved by finding another...
...That is the kind of self-dramatizing rhetoric that overed-ucated people use to inflate personal, psychological problems into ideological warfare...
...Click, click...
...Y.P.D...
...fusion is exacerbated by his imperfect mastery of craft...
...Once the shock wears off, Erica sets out to "find herself" in all the predictable ways (mostly in men's beds...
...These were supposed to be immediately recognizable, to allow us to "identify" with the film's New York hero and heroine...
...I can't even find a decent cause these days...
...Right, in the person of Saul Kaplan (Alan Bates), a Jewish abstract painter from London so impossible witty, wise, kind, and intelligent that once again we momentarily suspect Mazursky is setting us up for a fall...
...Mazursky the director made just as big a mistake in casting Kelly Bishop, Linda Miller and Pat Quinn, respectively, in the parts...
...Nothing else about An Unmarried Woman surprised me, for Mazursky announces everything at the outset with his relentless telegraphic style...
...All this is by way of introduction to Paul Mazursky's latest effort, An Unmarried Woman, which some critics have already compared favorably to Annie Hall...
...Yet his satires do not cut deeply, precisely because he prefers to exploit sentimental themes rather than risk anything...
...Soon after Martin walks out, for example, Erica enters therapy with an analyst who conducts her sessions like a spiritual refugee from the 1960s, wearing beads and sitting crosslegged in an apartment bedecked with macrame wall hangings...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
