I remember watching Opening Night (1977) a long time ago when I borrowed the Criterion Collection Cassavetes boxset from the uni library. I enjoyed it though I felt like I was missing something, maybe. You hear so much about John Cassavetes and then you watch one of his movies, and it’s such a singular experience. There’s something maddening about his characters, the way they talk, drink, cajole and carouse, push each other (and the audience at times), often the movies shifting between studied realism and mannered performance. The films of his which had immediate impact on me were A Woman Under The Influence and The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie, the latter being one of my all time favourites. Rewatching Opening Night on a whim, I felt I picked up more of the emotional and thematic layers, and had forgotten the tension and the eerieness as famous actor Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) comes into contact with the spirit of an obsessed fan, killed accidentally in an automobile accident after one of Myrtle’s stage performances. Whether this spirit is a fantasy, dream, real, metaphor – it’s all compelling and strange. The sudden violence, imagined or self-inflicted, the way in which this ‘haunting’ remains open as a symbol of Myrtle’s unease with aging or her disagreement with the play she’s performing in, The Second Woman, and the creative and/or romantic tensions with director Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara) and fellow actor Maurice Aaron (Cassavetes himself). I always remembered the strange way the film climaxes with the play going off the rails, the sense of hammy improv during the theatre performance, but now I saw more of the comedy in it and the surrealism of the sequence, as well as the buried narrative with Victor’s wife Zohra Lampert and her often silent or background presence throughout the whole movie. Cassavetes’ regulars have great personalities, faces and voices, but here especially the indomitable Rowlands commands attention, even when her character flames out and becomes a train-wreck, she continually fights against the ways in which others try to define or control her. You can stream Opening Night on Kanopy. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 