Review: Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman on Criterion Blu-ray

At his best, Mazursky dramatized how sociopolitics informed American domestic life, deftly evading preaching.

An Unmarried WomanAt his best, Paul Mazursky dramatized how sociopolitics informed American domestic life, deftly evading preaching, and as such today’s progressive filmmakers could learn quite a bit from him. One of his most acclaimed films, An Unmarried Woman is concerned with the rise and acceptance of divorce in the 1970s, and the liberation and confusion that resulted from that. With its leisurely paced scenes, unexpected comic curlicues, and unusually lived-in characterizations, the film allows its political meanings to arise almost subliminally. Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.

An Unmarried Woman begins with moments of domesticity that are pointedly at odds with the expectations set by the film’s title. This domesticity, characteristic of Mazursky’s aversion to platitudes, is shown to be simultaneously comfortable, challenging, and emotionally fraught. As Bill Conti’s score soars on the soundtrack, married couple Erica (Jill Clayburgh) and Martin (Michael Murphy) are jogging together through New York City, clearly enjoying a morning ritual, the sort of pleasurably taken-for-granted camaraderie that comes with longtime cohabitation. Then Martin steps in dog shit, soiling his new jogging shoes, and he briefly explodes at Erica, offering a counterpoint to the pleasure of kinship that we’ve just witnessed, a reaction that embodies the irrational resentment that springs from boredom, as well as his anger at Erica lecturing him for smoking. An Unmarried Woman abounds in such counterpoints.

What follows is a prolonged first act that acquaints us with the rhythms of this marriage and family. Martin is a stock broker who begins and ends each day watching updates on the exchange on TV. By contrast, Erica has a dreamier sensibility, working part-time at a fashionable art gallery. In one of the film’s most imaginative sequences, she fantasizes of being a ballet dancer, dancing around their apartment in her underwear, savoring the thought of having the place to herself. Their teen daughter, Patti (Lisa Lucas), is a precocious wiseass, enjoying catching Martin and Erica after sex and asking them, per Hemingway, if the Earth moved. When Martin and Erica speak, especially after work getting ready for bed, they do so with a familiarity that’s evocative of long-term relationships. Erica undresses in front of her husband, and this action is both erotic and casual. In fact, this action is erotic for being casual, and Mazursky’s gaze is attentive, appreciative, without succumbing to lewdness.

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Suddenly after a lunch, Martin tearfully confesses to cheating on Erica and that he’s leaving her. He airs his secret in the worst way imaginable: in the streets, while Erica is sharing with him how she’s comforted by her weekly dinners and drinks with her girlfriends—when she’s at the height of her love with her routines, with the assuring complacency of her life. Soon in the process of divorce, Erica must redefine herself as a self-sustained woman. This idea, the theme of the film, is almost entirely undiscussed by the characters head-on. The theme influences their conversations, of course, yet they talk around it. And this weight, of an anxiety that can’t quite be confronted, gives the film’s comic scenes an emotional anchor. Terror of loneliness informs the dinners Erica has with her friends (Pat Quinn, Linda Miller, and Kelly Bishop), as they deliver vulnerable arias about desire, fulfillment, and disappointment that are especially remarkable in a film written and directed by a man.

Mazursky is interested neither in the legal practicalities of divorce nor in making glib statements about empowerment. Rather, he explores Erica’s emotional realm as she reacquaints herself with men, experimenting with casual sex, partially as a way of stretching beyond her station as “someone’s wife,” and attempts to guide Patti through her separation from Martin. Several of the men are bizarre, per the dictates of the modern romantic comedy, on which An Unmarried Woman is a significant influence, yet they’re imbued with a pathos and a specificity that resists sexist reductions. An artist at the gallery where Erica works, Charlie (Cliff Gorman) is a working-class painter, a smart-ass who hits on her with an insistence that would scan as particularly intemperate today, yet in his way he’s alive to Erica, noticing her, raptly, in a fashion that Martin probably hasn’t in years. When they hook up, Mazursky homes in on the little details, the idiosyncrasies, of sex that are frequently absent from American cinema. Charlie comforts Erica through her awkwardness and embarrassment, kissing her leg as he pulls off her sock. The sequence captures an evolution in this brief coupling from tentativeness to tenderness. Even the man who assaults Erica, Bob (Andrew Duncan), is vividly drawn, in only a few scenes, as a person warped by loneliness and need.

Many romantic comedies preach of a woman’s need for independence while hypocritically settling them into a new relationship anyway. This film’s version of the right guy, Saul (Alan Bates), a British expressionist painter with a gentle, erudite, easygoing manner, would be positioned by many filmmakers as a solution to Erica’s problems, yet Mazursky and the actors inform this relationship with a subtle push-and-pull thorniness. Erica and Saul very much get along together, yet they have the tension that comes with dating as middle-aged people, with the baggage of many past wrong decisions and wrong people. The gift of this lovely, poignant film is that Mazursky allows the characters to roam; he doesn’t force them into boxes, and as such they often surprise us. Everyone in An Unmarried Woman is essentially an artist in his or her own way, spinning their uncertainty into knowing melancholic comic riffs. The central artist is Erica, whom Clayburgh plays with a wistful, very moving sense of diaphanousness. We’re allowed to see that Erica feels that she’s unfinished. Like most people, especially in middle adulthood who begin to wonder what they’ve been doing up until now.

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Image/Sound

The 4K digital restoration of An Unmarried Woman offers a surprisingly soft image, probably too soft, allowing certain backgrounds to look blurry, with flat black colors. Foreground detail is much stronger, and the other colors are generally vibrant, with particularly superb flesh tones. The monaural soundtrack is much less of a mixed bag. Bill Conti’s score has been rendered with stunning vibrancy, and the city life that characterizes the soundtrack of many scenes is presented here with range and multi-planed subtlety.

Extras

New interviews with actors Michael Murphy and Lisa Lucas are centered on Paul Mazursky’s approach to actors, especially his way of assuaging their fears and allowing them to adjust lines to suit their own ideas and needs. Another new interview, with Paul on Mazursky author Sam Wasson, persuasively discusses the filmmaker as an underrated auteur with distinctive themes and an almost European sense of openness. Meanwhile, an archive commentary with Mazursky and actress Jill Clayburgh is loose and conversational, exploring the conception of An Unmarried Woman, which was inspired by a friend of Mazursky’s wife, as well as the collaboration between the director, Clayburgh, and the other actors in the cast. Mazursky, unsurprisingly given the nature of the film, is very attentive to the little details that can make or break a scene. (The only disappointment with this commentary is the fact that the two participants were recorded separately.) Rounding out this package is a recording of a long lecture that Mazursky gave at the AFI in 1980, going in depth about the evolution of his career, and liner notes featuring an essay by Angelica Jade Bastien, which beautifully articulates the dynamism of the women in Mazursky’s work, and the novelty of this female-centrism in the especially masculine 1970s-era American cinema.

Overall

Criterion outfits Paul Mazursky’s lovely, eccentric, casually progressive character study with terrific supplements and a somewhat uneven transfer.

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Score: 
 Cast: Jill Clayburgh, Alan Bates, Michael Murphy, Cliff Gorman, Lisa Lucas, Pat Quinn, Kelly Bishop, Linda Miller, Penelope Russianoff  Director: Paul Mazursky  Screenwriter: Paul Mazursky  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 123 min  Rating: R  Year: 1978  Release Date: June 9, 2020  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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