Cinema
Surviving
Ted Whitehead
An Unmarried Woman (Warner West End) Nowadays films start where they used to end, with marriage, and the most popular storyline reads: Girl has Boy — Girl loses Boy — Girl is Free!
An Unmarried Woman (X) opens on a model marriage. Erica and Martin have had sex twice a week for seventeen years and their lust burns as sweetly as ever. She's a glamorous thirty-six-year-old with a parttime job in an art gallery, he's a glamorous forty-five-year-old with a job on Wall Street, and they enjoy the glamorous life of New York's upper-middle-class.
Even at this early stage, however, writer-director Paul Mazursky lightly touches on the ambivalence of Erica's attitudes towards sexuality. She's utterly thrown when one of her women friends has an affair with a man of nineteen —as if sex should be confined to younger women and older men, or perhaps ideally to married heterosexual coevals. And she can't stand her daughter having necking sessions with her boyfriend in the apartment; when the daughter asks if it would be better to have them in the Of' she agrees, but has to add the standard eVt sion about 'not being ready for it.' The fact is that Erica is not ready for her daugilte!'s permissive attitudes and prefers to live witicl her eyes shut. They are painfully open'i when her husband tells her that he has beell having an affair for a year and wants to leave to join the other woman. Revelation scenes are notoriously trici,‘Y; this one works brilliantly. Out of the blue Martin rings Erica for lunch, and they eat at one of those joints where you are foreve. trying to avoid sticking your elbow in Ylif neighbour's soup — or rather, she eats, aa prattles on about plans for summer, while he stares at his plate. Out in the street "" suddenly turns to her and, crying and stain: mering, gives her the news. She retcllo uncontrollably. In a series of sharp, often absurdly scenes, Mazursky charts Erica's reaction tu rejection: smashing the china, gefthig drunk, raging at the daughter and boy' friend. She moves from a desperate 111hc; andry — violently humiliating a man makes a pass — to a confused state of le wanting and hating men. The inevits so shrink suggests that she get herself laid,er, she spends a night with a macho PailltA, and is forced to recognise that someboar‘.1. who is a joke to her in daylight can be Mile vellous in bed. He has warned her tilafthe doesn't want any commitment, but ill is event it's she who decides that 010 enough. 610 she she Her education continues as unsuspected depths of intimacy with bslitile her daughter and her women friends. .4 beds a famous English artist and toys "'lip his invitation to come and live with hhllils of the country. But after surviving the Perr.iate freedom, she's just beginning to aPPI e'hira the opportunities, and so she tallfsd down. She is now a dedicated until' : tbe woman, and as if to prove it, she en.0.7rest. ultimate satisfaction — rejecting Y°11r Ftably fallen husband when the swine blevi` comes crawling back to you. It's a highly topical fantasy, P.ke d with engaging freshness and vulnerabilitY, "as' the Clayburgh (Best Actress at Cannes),,atitfreed woman. Lisa Lucas brings 8:e-role ifully exact adolescent wariness to s the of the daughter, while Alan BatesagaantrY painter gets just the right mix of g and unconscious chauvinism. It II"' all c argued that not every deserted ""ta. Alan expect the chance to turn down a.:nt of Bates; but it's the whole P°1„hould thuamv e dcluewveulospeu cdh taohtehreopn. h Mazursky's schema that his heroine can int were s'' for If Mrs Miniver provided a In° model women in the war, Erica provides a e shall for women in the sex war. I esPe.ct%H e coati' see many more Ericas, as Marriages frola bles, and the conduct of divorce Pass, (theY the Church via the Law to the GP,""t office should supply the forms at the P. At with the television licenses and so "
one point the shrink tells Erica: 'Your life has been discombobulated.' (Eh?) Given the number of discombobulated lives around, I welcome the defiant sexual optimism of this exhilarating fiction.
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