Molly Haskell
“In the beginning of Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, Erica, the still-married heroine played by Jill Clayburgh, is a person treading water, though in high urban style…. She skims the surface of her life with exquisite grace but never touches ground. Then, out of the blue, her husband tells her he is leaving her for a younger woman. She lands with a thud.
“Mazursky captures her state of mind with what is, for him, an unusually baroque visual conceit. In a sudden, cyclonic movement she whirls away from Murphy and across the street, as if, without the gravitational pull he exerts on her own life, she would disappear altogether.
“Fear enters her eyes for the first time. The rest of Mazursky’s brilliantly funny comedy about a painful liberation is concerned with the agonizing process by which she puts herself back together—or assembles herself for the first time….
“In a final, vortexlike image that echoes but redefines the earlier movement, she whirls again down the sidewalk, hugging the huge canvas he [the painter who “loves her madly”] as left with her, buffeted by winds but clinging, too, to her newly won sense of self. It is a fine and wondrous moment in the cinema when an ordinary woman’t triumph over her own life is more dizzying and satisfying than the traditional happy ending.
“Mazursky’s is a sensibility gloriously free of the cramping effects of ideological boxes. He makes no apologies for the upper-middle classness of his characters, nor is he worried that someone might think their emotional problems are not as reals as the problems, say, of paraplegics or political prisoners.
“…. Erica is every one of us, or, if not us, then someone we know very well, the one who hasn’t written a book about it yet. Erica—or any real-life counterpart—is the one who married right out of college, a reflex action from which all else reflexively followed. If she hadn’t been walked out on she would never have had the nerve, or the wherewithal—economic or professional—to walk out herself. Once abandoned, however, Erica is the one who discovers, like so many women, tht she can survive, and in the pleasure and confidence that come from that knowledge she has won half the battle.
“Jill Clayburgh has the role of a lifetime and is glorious. There is a simplicity, a transparency to her here that hasn't come through in her previous performances. She now finally deserves the Clayburgh cult that has been building, in my view, a bit prematurely. Credit Mazursky, who, like Bergman, seems to win the confidence of women. They allow his camera to seek out and find subtleties of expression and echoes of a complex, sensual intelligence that never surface in their work for other directors. Even Lisa Lucas as the adolescent daughter is extraordinary as she switches like quicksilver from being child to woman and back again, and from being her father's daughter to being her mother's.”
Molly Haskell
New York, March 6, 1978
[Note that, just a few months earlier, Diane Keaton had given the ?]
“Mazursky captures her state of mind with what is, for him, an unusually baroque visual conceit. In a sudden, cyclonic movement she whirls away from Murphy and across the street, as if, without the gravitational pull he exerts on her own life, she would disappear altogether.
“Fear enters her eyes for the first time. The rest of Mazursky’s brilliantly funny comedy about a painful liberation is concerned with the agonizing process by which she puts herself back together—or assembles herself for the first time….
“In a final, vortexlike image that echoes but redefines the earlier movement, she whirls again down the sidewalk, hugging the huge canvas he [the painter who “loves her madly”] as left with her, buffeted by winds but clinging, too, to her newly won sense of self. It is a fine and wondrous moment in the cinema when an ordinary woman’t triumph over her own life is more dizzying and satisfying than the traditional happy ending.
“Mazursky’s is a sensibility gloriously free of the cramping effects of ideological boxes. He makes no apologies for the upper-middle classness of his characters, nor is he worried that someone might think their emotional problems are not as reals as the problems, say, of paraplegics or political prisoners.
“…. Erica is every one of us, or, if not us, then someone we know very well, the one who hasn’t written a book about it yet. Erica—or any real-life counterpart—is the one who married right out of college, a reflex action from which all else reflexively followed. If she hadn’t been walked out on she would never have had the nerve, or the wherewithal—economic or professional—to walk out herself. Once abandoned, however, Erica is the one who discovers, like so many women, tht she can survive, and in the pleasure and confidence that come from that knowledge she has won half the battle.
“Jill Clayburgh has the role of a lifetime and is glorious. There is a simplicity, a transparency to her here that hasn't come through in her previous performances. She now finally deserves the Clayburgh cult that has been building, in my view, a bit prematurely. Credit Mazursky, who, like Bergman, seems to win the confidence of women. They allow his camera to seek out and find subtleties of expression and echoes of a complex, sensual intelligence that never surface in their work for other directors. Even Lisa Lucas as the adolescent daughter is extraordinary as she switches like quicksilver from being child to woman and back again, and from being her father's daughter to being her mother's.”
Molly Haskell
New York, March 6, 1978
[Note that, just a few months earlier, Diane Keaton had given the
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