Saw "A woman under the influence" (1974) by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk yesterday. What an exhausting experience.The seemingly neverending, painfully awkward scenes ( Like the breakfast of Peter Falk with his colleagues or his trip to the beach with his children) and irritating uneventful conversations without a direction reveal the insecurity and fragility of people and their relationships. The whole movie seems like an improvised stream of trivial conversations and events which transports an underlying despair that is so intense that it leaves an exhausted audience behind (An impact similar to "Julia" with Tilda Swinton).
The movie demonstrates how people are easily overburdened with permantly conducting, evaluating, adapting their behaviour in relation to others and social norms. How thin the layer of normality is and how little it takes to shake that fragile balance.
Although all the main attention is the title giving woman played by Gena Rowlands. But it is her husband Nick, played by Peter Falk, who seems to be under the influence of his tumbling wife and who himself is more and more loosing it. Peter Falks performance in this picture is of an intesity and a realistic depiction of a simple man who is torn between his mad love and combatant loyalty for his wife and his wish for order and normality, who seems to be overwhelmed by the change of the personality that he can only helplessly witness. He seems to have nothing but pure passion and anger to oppose the corrosion of Mables persona. Powers whose detachment not only seem to be unable to stop Mables collapse but seem to accelerate the collapse of social structure.
In his performance Peter Falk unfolds a realistic intensity which always operates under the limit of "opera gestures" that Gena Rowland in her sometimes maniristic associative acting is presenting.
