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f i l m An Unmarried Woman Written, produced and directed by Paul Mazursky in 1978 distributed by 20th Century Fox, 124 minutes   An American review... David Ansen in Newsweek, 13 March 1978. The Re-Mating Game American Filmmakers, by and large, show a curious lack of interest in The Way We Live Now. They make movies about The Way We Were, The Way We Will Be, and The Way We Would Like to Be, as if the world they actually lived in were better left to novelists and reporters. Not Paul Mazursky. His fond satires -- Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Blume in Love, Harry and Tonto -- have an uncanny capacity to send shivers of recognition through a middle-class audience. You don't have to live in New York or L.A., his creative turfs, to love Mazursky: his world of affluent, neurotic Americans plunging headlong into the social and sexual upheavals of the '70s is everywhere about us. In An Unmarried Woman, which ranks with his very best, the satirist takes a back seat to the wary romanticist. It's his most intimate movie, a funny, sad, quietly loving account of a comfortable Upper East Side woman whose life is shattered one afternoon when her husband of sixteen years (Michael Murphy) confesses his love for a woman he met at Bloomingdale's. How does Erica (Jill Clayburgh), the mother of a teen-age daughter and modestly employed in a SoHo art gallery, deal with her new status as a single woman? With terror, anger, mistrust -- and a growing, giddy awareness of the possibilities of independence, endangered but not thwarted by an almost swept-away romance with a charming English-Jewish artist (Alan Bates). Casual Sex: The brilliance of An Unmarried Woman lies less in the outline of Erica's story than in the deliciously accurate details with which Mazursky portrays her journey to self-discovery. It leads from the psychiatrist's couch (where her woman doctor wears ethnic shawls and encourages her to "take a holiday from guilt") to nervous forays into casual sex (where her giggles shift breathlessly into erotic excitement) to angry confrontations with her runaway husband to the painful dinner where she must introduce her new lover to her precocious but wounded daughter. Erica may be the most minutely developed character in all the recent women's films, and Jill Clayburgh's portrayal is a revelation. The sense of strain, of willed effervescence in Clayburgh's earlier work has vanished: whether screaming in rage at a date who's made a gauche pass or quietly commiserating with her "club" of women friends, she gets deep inside her part and never lets go. The supporting cast is no less fine. Lisa Lucas's smart, brittle daughter may be the definitive portrait of urban adolescence (it makes you realize how fake the sitcom kid was in The Goodbye Girl). Mazursky shows us new aspects of Michael Murphy, who manages the difficult task of being at once callow and sympathetic, and he brings out a warmth and a debonair maturity in Alan Bates that has seldom been encouraged. Kelly Bishop, LInda Miller and Pat Quinn may not seem the most likely choices to be Erica's closest friends, but they play together with a rapport that suggests years of intimacy. In snuggling up so close to his heroine, Mazursky sacrifices some of the wild satirical highs we expect from him -- the andante pacing could use a little more allegro (and a little less help from Bill Conti's overdone score). But we are more than rewarded by Mazursky's generosity and insight. He's burrowed deeper into the upper middle-class psyche than ever before, and if it's sometimes uncomfortable there, the unease is one we recognize as our own.   An English review... Michael Billington in the Illustrated London News, July 1978. The Liberation of Erica The best film I saw at this year's Cannes Film Festival -- indeed the best film I have seen anywhere for some time -- was Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman. It is witty, tender, erotic and it contains a performance from Jill Clayburgh that lights up the screen with its sparky, nervy intelligence. Mazursky, who has written and directed the picture, tackles head-on one of the most popular themes of our time: female liberation. His heroine, Erica, is a woman who after 15 years of relatively contented marriage to a Wall Street broker learns that her husband is having an affair with a girl he met at the shirt counter in Bloomingdale's. It is both a painful humiliation and a spiritual release. Living alone again (apart, that is, from her 14-year-old-daughter), she follows her therapist's advice to get back into the stream of life. She lunches, she dates, she has a one-night stand with a sculptor and then she meets a handsome Abstract Expressionist (played by Alan Bates) who works in acrylics and who begs her and her daughter to spend the summer with him in Vermont. She chickens out, believing that she has to stay in New York and find herself. Hard-line feminists I met in Cannes attacked the movie on the grounds that women alone have a much tougher time of it and do not get to meet that many good-looking Abstract Expressionists. But this seems to me perverse and ridiculous: maturely sexy women just on the threshold of middle-age do get to meet good-looking men and, if they do not, they should. I sometimes think the more cantankerous feminists hate the very idea of happy relationships. What is slightly harder to accept is that a woman like Jill Clayburgh would have put up for so long with her boring stiff of a husband. Typically, when out jogging he over-reacts to getting dog mess on his sneakers: contrast a scene later on where the Bates character treats a similar incident lightly. Given the quantities of independent women currently at large, I cannot quite believe that such a girl as Erica would tolerate her contemporary doll's house existence. But, that aside, it is a film that is plugged into contemporary mores while retaining an awareness of their absurdity. Erica's man-hating prickliness immediately after separation is beautifully captured: a back-of-a-cab pass by an innocuous press agent is treated as if it were rape, and she almost goes into shock when her doctor suggests they might have a drink together. there is humour, too, in the observation of Erica's daughter who is mildly inquisitive about her parent's sex life ("Did the earth move?" she wants to know) and who is precociously flip when her mother's new lover comes to dinner. On top of all this Arthur Ornitz's photography observes Manhattan with the kind of wry affection one finds in that Stephen Sondheim lyric about "the rusty fountains and the dusty trees with the battered barks". And Clayburgh, edgy, fraught and dazzingly desirable, and Bates as the impish, mischievous Abstract Expressionist both give performances that make the cinema a better place. It is, in short, a film to see, argue about and then to see again.   Bates on "An Unmarried Woman" In a 1980 Today Show interview with Gene Shalit, while promoting the film Nijinsky, Bates had this to say about An Unmarried Woman: Shalit: Did you like the role that you played in An Unmarried Woman? So many women in America a) admired you, and b) said, 'There is no such man as the role Alan Bates played...where am I going to find a man that wonderful, strong, good, kind, sure of himself?' Bates: It was an extraordinary part, because on the page it didn't look very much. I really was in two minds whether to do it, except that I had seen three of Paul Mazursky's films, and I loved them. He has a really personal style and wit, and I love Paul -- I think he's terrific, so that was the main attraction. The part itself, on paper, did not ... Shalit: [interrupting] So you did something with that part... Bates: He talked to me a lot. I think that what I hadn't seen was that the part really was a symbol of something. It became highly romantic, of course, which is always an advantage -- to play something romantic -- Shalit: You like that a lot? Bates: (laughing), Well, people like it, you know... | collection of stills from An Unmarried Woman |

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