A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds more than a few surprises.
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What critics compared A Woman Under the Influence to
Consider her monologue on the drive home, where an unexpected reference to "A Woman Under the Influence" results in Louisa reciting Pauline Kael's critical review of the film and Gena Rowland's celebrated performance.
In the second half of the film, on the interminable trip back from his parents’ house, Jake says that he likes John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence , which the young woman essentially characterizes as a fake-feminist work of masochism, claiming that Gena Rowlands gives an exhausting tour de force, and that “nothing she does is memorable because she does so much.”
A discussion of Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence devolves into Buckley slipping invisibly into a recitation of Pauline Kael’s negative review of the film .
The Young Woman and Jake talk endlessly about Wordsworth’s poetry or John Cassavetes 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence (Buckley not only mimics Gena Rowland’s performance, she recites famed critic Pauline Kael’s dismissive review).
The two engage in epic conversations, touching on everything from William Wordsworth to the aforementioned Kael’s review of the 1974 John Cassavetes movie, “A Woman Under the Influence,” which Lucy recites from memory (it seems).
In another scene, the pair debate the quality of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, a clear spiritual cousin to I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
In that sense, Ramsay’s latest has more in common with A Woman Under the Influence, the John Cassavetes film where Gena Rowlands’ seemingly wild character that lashes out at an ordinary society that expects the impossible of her – all while treating her interiority as an afterthought.
…her unraveling more akin to Gena Rowlands' in John Cassavetes' "A Woman Under the Influence."
Grace’s mental breakdown recalls such titanic works of empathetic cinema as John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence…
Kechiche signals his aspirations toward the epic by borrowing Lawrence of Arabia's bifurcated structure and throws in a spaghetti-dinner homage to Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence to tip off just how far we're going to fall.
Naturally for a film this steeped in its own construction, there are oodles of film references, from Lars von Trier's "Europa" to "Harold and Maude" to, most bizarrely, "A Woman Under the Influence," in a squirm-inducing scene in which Polley's depressed housewife joins their daughter's birthday party and proceeds to make herself into an embarrassing dancing child.
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It is one of the most captivating and overwhelming portrayals of mental illness in a domestic setting since John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence in 1974.
Primed for madness under the thumb of her father, who obviously had been wrestling with depression, Catherine goes into "Repulsion" meets "Black Swan" meets "A Woman Under the Influence"-style crazy town, and if you're going to do this kind of movie, you have to deliver the paranoid, hallucinatory freakout scene.
The obvious antecedent for Queen of Earth is John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, but Perry draws more extensively from what seems like an entire subgenre of two-handed women-in-crisis dramas, the most pointed of which come directly from the era between the ’60s and the ’70s that he cites as the most influential to his work. 1 Shot on 16mm and announced through stylised titles in bold red cursive (designed by Teddy Blanks, who also designed the memorable book covers of Listen Up Philip, glimpsed here in Ginny’s grasps and stocking her bookshelves), Queen of Earth is conscious of what informs its narrative and aesthetic, whilst never leaning on kitsch or lazy imitation.
Taking a page, or maybe a full novella, from John Cassavetes' kitchen-sink melodramas, Blue Valentine amplifies the intensity a notch or two above the expected; it leaves the actors looking bruised and exhausted, like Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands at the end of Cassavetes' A Woman Under The Influence.
Her histrionics pay tribute to the current feminist idolization of Gena Rowland’s gyrations as a schizophrenic in A Woman Under the Influence…
…it feels right for this particular character to be at war with herself and to be a personality trifle of Beatrice from “Much Ado About Nothing,” Mabel from “A Woman Under the Influence,” and Mae West.
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Following her whims and enthusiasms greedily, she’s just off-kilter enough to occasionally call to mind Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence .
It’s a character study in the tradition of, say, “Harry and Tonto” or “A Woman Under the Influence,” but it also wants to be a paranoid thriller along the lines of “The Parallax View” or “Three Days of the Condor.”