Log

The question that cuts across each of Cassavetes’s films and stage productions, eloquently posed and explored by George Kouvaros in his book-length study of the director: “Where does it happen?”

Where does the scene begin, end, gain momentum, fizzle out, lurch in a new direction? Where do its stakes become apparent, slip away, alter, reemerge? Where do its shifting emotional energies crystallize in performance? Where does all the commotion attain to a single, discrete event with its own parameters?

In the case of Mabel (Rowlands), where does her “insanity” crop up and become something that must be dealt with, something requiring a “sane” course of action?

Such a moment is indeed hard to mark but it becomes legible as an accretion of gestures, bodily tics (Mabel repeatedly hooking a thumb over her shoulder), pauses in conversation, jostles and flicks of the camera . . .

We sense a breaking point is looming not just because of Mabel’s hysterical behavior but because of the nervousness the potential of her behaving “insanely” rouses in those around her, in particular her husband (Falk), whose protestations to his co-workers that she’s “not crazy” alert us to a history of abnormal behavior that we haven’t seen a sure sign of yet (and since the other characters are hardly composed themselves, it’s hard to know precisely what constitutes normality, sanity, or maturity within the film’s world).

“It might well be that, despite Cassavetes’s claim to be interested only in people, it is not the subjectivity of these emotions that is central to his films but rather the traces they leave one the faces of the actors, traces that can be revealed only through the camera’s scrutiny. The end result is the sense of an interior dimension only glimpsed through a haze of accumulated actions, minor movements, and expressions that the camera struggles to decipher.” (George Kouvaros)