i dream in super eight

Watched Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman last weekend and loved it for being one of those movies that sets a tone and a mood you want to live in for a while.

Mazursky, here at least, is a director who likes people — both the characters in his movie and the audience watching it. He trusts them to be complex, intelligent creatures who can feel conflicting things and hold more than one idea in their heads at a time. He gives us a movie that’s adult in its comprehension of the world and its take on relationships, in the way it’s both light and serious, clear-eyed but still hopeful. Frankly, it makes the neurotic highs and lows of Annie Hall (an obvious peer and a movie I like because of its sentimentality) look stunted and limited in emotional scope.

Phrases like “groundbreaking when it came out” — in the Netflix summary — make it sound dated and I figured I might be watching it mostly for shots of pre-retailed Soho and cool seventies clothes. While it’s satisfying on both these counts (Jill Clayburgh, I’ll take your winter coat and boots!), the only noticeably dated aspect seemed to be the score. Okay, so maybe it’s not realistic that Jill Clayburgh’s divorcee would meet Alan Bates’s available artist as she does. But watching them get together feels real and also refreshing. Especially these days, when the message of so much of the crap that passes for a cultural conversation about women and love is that the key to everything is to find a husband before your sell-by date. (I think what I find almost more offensive and dumb than likening a woman to a carton of milk and idealizing marriage as a cure-all is the assumption that there is, in fact, a key to everything).

Roger Ebert in 1978 wrote:

An Unmarried Woman is such a good picture not because it states vast truths about men and women but because it finds that there are none; its heroine and, maybe the rest of us, are in a muddle most of the time, and depend more than we’d want to admit on old friendships, white wine, and quiet desperation to get us through. Having established that point, Mazursky then goes on to provide hope—or Alan Bates, anyway. And he does it in a movie so firmly in control of its language, its body movement, its personal interplays, its most fleeting facial expressions (remember the daughter’s dubious little sniff?) that we’re touched by real human sensibilities here.

Next up in the queue is Blume in Love. Mazursky-mania!