An Unmarried Woman [1978] Jill Clayburgh

http://bayimg.com/NaaBFAadg An Unmarried Woman (1978) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078444/ An Unmarried Woman is a 1978 American comedy-drama film that tells the story of the wealthy New York wife Erica Benton (Jill Clayburgh) whose perfect life is shattered when her stockbroker husband Martin (Michael Murphy) leaves her for a younger woman. The film documents Erica's attempts at being single again, where she suffers with confusion, sadness, and rage. As her life progresses, she begins to bond with several friends and finds herself inspired and even feels happier by her renewed liberation. The film also touches on the overall sexual liberation of the 1970s. Erica eventually finds love with a rugged, yet sensitive British artist (Alan Bates). The film co-stars Cliff Gorman, Kelly Bishop and Pat Quinn. Jill Clayburgh ... Erica Alan Bates ... Saul Michael Murphy ... Martin Cliff Gorman ... Charlie Patricia Quinn ... Sue (as Pat Quinn) Kelly Bishop ... Elaine Lisa Lucas ... Patti Linda Miller ... Jeannette Andrew Duncan ... Bob Daniel Seltzer ... Dr. Jacobs Matthew Arkin ... Phil Penelope Russianoff ... Tanya Novella Nelson ... Jean Raymond J. Barry ... Edward Ivan Karp ... Herb Rowan Though I don’t much care for the kind of people this film is about, nor for the trendy ideas it deals with, I am won over by its crisp, crackling competence, the literate wittiness of its script, Mazursky’s sensitivity to pace in the editing of both image and music, and his powerful economy of characterization. If the film’s ideas and situations are old, its treatment of them is original, and sparkles all the time with visual interest and vocal energy. Moving through New York’s streets, parks, restaurants, and galleries becomes a kind of metaphor for moving through life, with its many pleasures (stopping for ice cream), pains (hearing bad news), and pleasures-and-pains (like stepping into dogshit, an experience the reaction to which is a comic measure of the difference between Erica’s husband and her new lover). All of the supporting players are strong, with several award-quality performances, and least of all can I fault Alan Bates’s outrageous and sultry painter, Saul Kaplan. Yet if Mazursky wants to celebrate Erica’s declaration of independence—as he seems to do at the end, following her walk through New York carrying Kaplan’s legacy to her, the enormous painting he leaves her holding after her last refusal to accompany him to Vermont for the summer—he was wrong to try to do it with Bates as Saul. Even the women in the audience (perhaps I should say especially the women) want Erica to go with him. I’ve long been interested in the collective lech that middle-class, college-graduate women have for Bates’s cool, intellectual sexiness—a well-deserved response to a fine actor’s mystique, but one that works consistently against An Unmarried Woman’s intentions as much as it may work for its box-office receipts. I have it on the authority of an Alan Bates admirer who is very close to me that Mazursky, in staging and directing the street-and-sidewalk loveplay scene between Erica and Saul, has got right to the heart of what turns women on about Bates’s style. But much as I have to admire a man for capturing so palpably well what is sexy to women (something few men are very sharp about), I pity Mazursky for blowing his own ship out of the water: the women in the audience who are in the best position to sympathize with Erica, and to join Mazursky in applauding her independence, are precisely the ones who, in Erica’s position, would most enthusiastically accompany Saul Kaplan—or better still, Alan Bates—to Vermont, for a summer or a lifetime. Be all that as it may, the scorching fireworks of personality and fully-rounded characters that abound in Mazursky’s film are its most appealing aspect, and redeem its several mistakes and misjudgments. The writer-director has created a film both sensitive and lighthearted, punctuated with many fleshy closeups that amplify good cinema acting and make us see with others’ eyes. I wish Erica were a more stimulating and satisfying person—she still has a long way to go at the film’s end—but she is the kind of person Mazursky is interested in, and if that interest keeps him making movies as watchable as this one, he’s entitled. The movie stays focused on Erica, there are no moments that deal with Martin’s new love, there are no confrontations between those two women (we never even meet her) and even the divorce proceedings take place off-screen. We hear Martin and Erica discuss Patti but it’s only to help us mark a mental timeline. There are three scenes with Martin after he leaves Erica and they are all confrontational. The only predictable scene in the film comes at the end when Martin meets up with her to tell her that he has been dumped and he wants to come home. Martin is painted as a selfish, egotistical jerk who walks out on his wife and child and then wants to come back. It helps our sympathy for Erica while also helping us to understand the freedom that she is now experiencing. The theme of An Unmarried Woman is Erica’s ability to have to rebuild her life and find a foothold on her independence. She has been deeply hurt by Martin, she doesn’t want a full-time commitment with Saul, she has seen the walls of her marriage crumble around her and she wants to see what is in the world that will make her happy. This is very much a film of the Me Generation, of self-exploration and about a woman trying to find something more in life than being subservient to a man. Looking at it today, the woman's journey still seems to be told truthfully, but that trip now produces a shrug of the shoulders instead of a clenched fist and a hearty "right on, sister." The ideas that seemed fresh in 1978 don't seem wrong today, but they do seem trite and obvious, and we just can't muster up all that much sympathy for a beautiful woman living in a gorgeous Manhattan apartment, given that virtually every other woman in the world would willingly exchange places with her, man or no man. Devoid of its emotional context, the film is now stripped of one of the two major elements which made it seem important in 1978. Oh, it still plays out all right. It is still interesting for us guys to eavesdrop on the luncheon conversations, and the overall story still works because it is true and honest, but An Unmarried Woman now leaves us wondering how this solid but unremarkable film could ever have been considered one of the five best in any year.

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