John Cassavetes - A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

John Cassavetes’ devastating drama details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself. Starring Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands (in two of the most harrowing screen performances of the 1970s) as a married couple deeply in love yet unable to express that love in terms the other can understand, the film is an uncompromising portrait of domestic turmoil. One of the benchmark films of American independent cinema — an heroic document from a true maverick director.

Cassavetes vuelve a plasmar con inigualable fuerza el retrato y los sentimientos de una mujer, un ama de casa mentalmente inestable con continuos cambios de humor que bordean la enfermedad. Falk es su marido, un trabajador que trata de comprenderla, pero que se enfrenta a un problema que se ve incapaz de resolver.





John Cassavetes' harrowing masterpiece charts the emotional meltdown of a suburban housewife and its effects on her blue-collar Italian family. Gena Rowlands stars as Mabel Longhetti, a mother of three whose husband Nick (Peter Falk) works as a construction worker; a mismatched couple like so many others in Cassavetes films, the Longhettis seem to be complete opposites: she's impetuous, extroverted, and fragile, while he's controlling, distant, and hard-bitten. Their differences underscore a series of domestic dramas, culminating in a nervous breakdown that sends Mabel to a psychiatric hospital for six months, only to return to a home environment on even thinner ice than before.





The improvisational style central to Cassavetes' vision is at its most acute throughout A Woman Under the Influence. Like its title heroine, the film threatens to veer out of control at any time, its shape and scope defined not by narrative but by the emotional upheaval at its center. Embracing the full spectrum of the Longhettis' relationship, from seismic bursts of high drama to small, even trivial moments of domestic tedium, its long scenes relentlessly probe every nook and cranny of the family's life, drawing out each moment for maximum emotional impact; the film is by turns beautiful and ugly, illuminating and frustrating.




As the confused, overwhelmed, and hypersensitive Mabel, Rowlands delivers one of the screen's most excruciatingly honest performances. This can directly be attributed to Rowlands's real-life husband Cassavetes, whose insistence on getting to the inner core of his characters' emotional states defined him as an artist. Falk portrays Nick with a harsh yet delicate pathos that is also honest and heartbreaking. A woman under the influence is an awe-inspiring work of art from a maverick American director.

Criterion Collection rip

Una mujer bajo la influencia es la medida de la existencia real y no fingida. La particularidad de los momentos a través de imágenes cotidianas como prueba de que puede existir un tipo de cine que represente, con ojos sensibles, el impulso incontenible de nuestra condición de seres humanos que se consumen en los interiores cuando sobreviene la atemporalidad que reporta la angustia. La tendencia a justificar lo que la gran mayoría califica de locura o como un impulso suprasensible de nuestra propia naturaleza, tiende a elevarnos como individuos más allá del eterno suceder de la monotonía rutinaria, que afecta al sentido de las horas que determinan la tarea u obligación de sopesar los valores superficiales que hemos de representar para amoldarnos al arquetipo básico de persona que ha de pensar como todos piensan para que sea aceptada en sociedad.

La médula de la obra es una mujer de mediana edad que no oculta sus impurezas porque no necesita de una profundidad existencial y sensible, mostrando su verdadera personalidad carente de abstractas realidades. El extraordianrio papel de Gena Rowland será resultado de la improvisación de las formas, la garantía de una existencia inesperada que no mira más allá del momento: el futuro será concebido como una sensación presente, lo que reporta a la película la consideración de un exacto retrato de la vida como resultado de la causalidad.

Script/Guión: John Cassavetes
Music/Música: Bo Harwood
Cinemaptography/Fotografía: Mitch Breit
Cast/Reparto: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Fred Draper, Lady Rowlands, Katherine Cassavetes, Matthew Laborteaux, Matthew Cassel, Christina Grisanti