Opening Night (1977)

 

In his Criterion essay for A Woman Under the Influence, Kent Jones says: “Tagging a movie like Woman with something as neat as a ‘subject’ is a fairly useless activity.  .  .  .  Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.” He describes it as a film which uses human activity the way other films use color. 

Jones has unique insights about Cassavetes, and points out where his assessment diverges from many others’.  But from those others you often see similar sentiments about the uniqueness of Cassavetes’s films, and often in language that’s difficult to understand.  They speak about them in superlatives, sometimes mentioning how poorly other films compare.  But without having seen the films, it’s never been clear to me what experience they’re trying to describe.

Now, having seen a few, I can phrase it in a way that makes sense to me, and I hope it makes sense to everyone else.  Watching these films is like sitting in with a group of strangers and trying to fit in.  The frequent close-ups, editing, and sound design create an unusual tension.  It’s not suspense, just the knowledge that for any action someone performs, anything could be going on inside their head.  If you know someone, you’re ready for them.  If you don’t, you proceed with care, trying to detect where their boundaries are, what happens when they’re crossed, and the room's energy levels.  And as the films go on, it all changes as you’re trying to figure it out, and you encounter people who happen to have other ways of responding to this same tension.  I haven’t seen other films like this, so I understand now why Cassavetes's films leave such an impression. 

Opening Night follows Myrtle Gordon, a famous actress played by Gena Rowlands, who makes increasingly drastic breaks from her personal circle and professional norms.  She tells us part of the reason outright: acting used to mean something more to her than it has recently, when she could sense that through her acting she was giving something valuable to the audience.  She wants to recover that feeling, but finds the play she’s working on doesn’t let her.

But part of the reason remains mysterious.  Myrtle is haunted by the death of one of her fans which we see early in the film.  It is certainly an influence on her actions, but largely because Myrtle herself is uncertain about what it might mean.  What matters is that this haunting is both frightening and fascinating, pulling us toward something because we know we can’t anticipate it.

And in fact, the same is true of Myrtle’s breaking away from expected behavior.  We come to understand that the production of a play is complicated, not just logistically but in reconciling the different feelings of the producers, writers, and other behind-the-scenes figures.  Myrtle’s behavior is risky—psychologically, physiologically, and professionally—for her and anyone who put stakes on the table to make the play happen.  There are hints that it could help Myrtle achieve something.  Testing the boundaries might make things better.  At the same time, we see this really is a dangerous situation.  And the more she tries without succeeding, the more confined her world becomes. 

The film ends on this ambiguity.  It illustrates a double-edged process in which a character can only pursue her values by putting them at risk.  In the same way Myrtle struggled to determine her own contribution to the play, the viewer must determine their own contribution to what they witnessed.