Minnie e Moskowitz

At times, you forget that you are watching a movie and not the lives of two average (but unique) people and the incomplete lives that they live. Searching for love, if not just acceptance, both live in a world where relationships are as confusing as the people in the relationship. By the end of the movie you can't help but smile at the images Cassavetes captures in the last 30 seconds. Without any narrative, Cassavetes gives the conclusion to the two character's lives together. True happiness...

One of John Cassavetes' greatest films is also one of his least known. He made it in 1971 and over the years it has been largely forgotten. I've seen it described as a romantic comedy and even as a screwball comedy but I found it very disturbing. It's not a comedy and I'm not even sure it's a love story. It's characters are all dysfunctional, unhappy people and Minnie and Moskowitz are the most dysfunctional of all.

She works in a museum and he works as a car-parking attendant and the film charts their hit and miss relationships, with each other and with other people. It is also largely improvised which gives it the feeling of life being lived in front of our eyes rather than simply being played out but these are people you definitely wouldn't want to know or maybe they aren't people at all but just extentions of Cassavetes' off-the-wall imagination.

It is magnificently acted by Cassavetes' repertory company of friends and family though at times it feels more like a series of classes at the Actor's Studio. Gena Rowlands is Minnie and Seymour Cassell is Moskowitz and they are superb as you would expect as indeed are everyone else, particularly Val Avery and Timothy Carey as men having meltdowns in restaurants and an uncredited Cassavetes as an unfaithful husband, while the cinematography of the three credited cinematographers, (Alric Edens, Michael Margulies and Arthur J. Ornitz), gives the film the documentary-like look the director obviously intended. This is independent cinema at its purest and most unrefined; scary, moving, rarely romantic. Just don't call it a comedy.

Step the third in my journey through Cassavetes..

Here, he takes one of the most popular movie formats, the romance. Boy- meets-girl in LA, under the lights. But she is no cool femme fatale, she is fragile, unsure of herself. He is no Bogie himself; as the film starts he is watching The Maltese Falcon in a theater, a scene where Mary Astor throws herself crying on Bogie's feet. Trying to pick up women afterwards, he's chased out of bars, looked at as a weirdo and beaten up in an alley.

The idea is that we are not going to see movie people, but real people on the street. That was the ambition anyway, a situation aggravated by Cassavetes' actorly Studio background—as in Husbands, we have constant shouting matches, awkward intrusions, obnoxious pulling and nervousness. He seems to think the room inhabited by these characters won't feel real and lived, unless we have damage on the walls, a Greek sensibility, after all the main story recasts Zorba.

So unlike a Bogart film, the actors here don't coolly glide off each other, they cut themselves on each other's edges.

The same situation develops here as I described in my comment on Husbands. The edges, the damage are unusually pronounced, by this I mean a situation like when Moskowitz almost runs her over with his truck to get her to go with him takes me out of it. A softer next moment will pull me in again, until the next hysteric one and so on.

Which brings me to my main discussion about presence.

Moskowitz is the kind of character who can be likable once you get to know him, the sort of bond you form with coworkers that greatly depends on shared time. Minnie is warm when we first see her, but there's a haughty, nervous ghost in her. It is, let's say, a truer to life perception than the immediately charming Bogarts and Stanwycks of old. It requires work to take them in, giving space.

That narrative room, that space where characters wreck themselves and things works the same way once you excise the shouty moments, simply wonderful. None of the individual visual moments are cool or typically beautiful. The locales are drab and mundane. The light and textures all natural, the whole is imperfect but breathes. In this, he equals Pasolini, another master of the living eye.

So on a moment-by- moment basis, the space is like the characters, intensely present flow to undefined horizon. In a movie like the Maltese Falcon, the narrative horizon is immediately defined (get the bird), and again defined in every scene (get out of there, rough someone up, etc.) so we are at all times comfortably tethered, enjoying the play. What Cassavetes does matters in the long run in the sculpting of the overall effect, it doesn't leap to attention.

Like Husbands, this slowly starts to work for me once I have a narrative shift that faintly, very faintly defines a certain horizon in the story—here marriage. Cassavetes is work, because this happens so late in the movie, the bulk of it is like staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration, or waiting for musicians to tune their instruments. Here, that shift happens about 9/10ths in the film, and then we're through that and a new horizon opens, the closing shots of family life and then it's over.

So it starts to work late but extends for me to long after it's over, it's one of the most haunting effects I know, transcendentally marvelous; more on that in the next comment on Woman.

This is an incredible achievement for John Cassavetes. Not only has he made an outstanding screwball/romantic comedy, but he has also made a deep and biting attack on the way we let the movies(and also our culture) shape the way we see the world. For those of you who are seeking a love story, Cassavetes provides an extremely lovely one. The rules of the screwball genre are strictly followed. A man meets a woman, they are an impossible match in terms of personality, they try to fall in love, then comes the inevitable 'hiccups' in their relationship, and last but not least, the happy ending. But, as has always been the case with Cassavetes, that is only a very small fraction of what you'll get. He obviously has got a lot more to say. The 'surface' story is not the only story here. Beneath it lies another 'story'. And I don't think the other story will ever get past you unnoticed. The real story here is a 'cultural' one. It is a biting attack on the way we let movies and our culture influence our way of seeing the world. How does he present this attack? Well let me give you an example. The other day I watched this film with a friend. He made quite a few comments but the most striking one was when he complained about how is it that someone as unattractive as Seymour Moskowitz could get a woman as pretty as Minnie to like him(when you see the film you'll see). Now that is exactly the kind of attitude that Cassavetes is attacking. Why must everyone be 'handsome' or 'good looking' to be able to get a girl to like him? Minnie will constantly say to Seymour in the film that, "That's not the right face. You're not the man I'm in love with." It's a subtle attack but no less powerful. There's even one instance where Minnie, while in conversation with her friend, talks about movies as being a conspiracy because "They set you up. And no matter how bright you are you still believe it." This is a shining example of the fact that it is not enough to just recognise the problem, because it doesn't mean anything until you do something about it. There's a lot more, but I don't think it will be fun if I talked about everything. Part of the thrill of watching a movie like this is figuring it out. So I'll just talk about the 'surface' story a little bit more. A lot of people has called this movie 'earnestly real'. But don't be put off by that because like this world we live in, it's not all grim and grin. This isn't a Ken Loach film. While Cassavetes definitely does show us how ugly the world really is and can be, he has got enough insight to also show us that life can also be wonderful. I can give you a lot more examples, but I think it's best if you discover them for yourself. My comment here does not do justice to the movie. There's too much for me to say. And I don't think the space here allows it. So just go and see the movie. It'll be worth every minute.

Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) doesn't believe in the movies. As a girl, she fantasized about finding a Prince Charming in the shape of Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable, living in a fancy house, and having kids the neighborhood could wince in jealousy over. But now Minnie's in her late 30s, fully aware that the man of her dreams probably doesn't exist. She swears that she's gotten used to the fact that reality isn't so rose-colored and things can't always turn out the way you want them to; but once you're a romantic you're always a romantic, and deep down, Minnie still finds herself hopeful that someday her Bogie will arrive on her doorstep.

Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) is a free-spirited valet with no great ambitions in life, contented drifting from town to town, from bar to bar, causing ruckuses and speaking his mind. Ponytailed and handlebar-mustached, he has no problem with the judgmental world or his rotten temper, which seems to escalate from zero to sixty through the slightest provocation: bar fights are a norm in his life. But despite the ever mounting flaws that seem to continuously tarnish his character, he's a good man, just a lost one.

By chance, these two misfits meet after Minnie endures a particularly awful date; the man who took her out, a demented widower, nearly assaults her in a parking lot after she flatly rejects him. As if he's magnet for action-packed situations, Seymour flies to the rescue, knocking the date out and speeding away with Minnie in his beat-up pick-up truck. For Seymour, it's love at first sight; but for Minnie, this long-haired, hairy-lipped time-bomb is a red flag, not a Gable. Seymour, however, isn't the kind of guy that gives up a good woman when he sees one. So he spends the rest of "Minnie and Moskowitz" trying to win her over — and with their identical lonely hearts, it might not be so difficult after all.

"Minnie and Moskowitz" is John Cassavetes' warmest film, a quirky romantic comedy frequently raucous (Seymour has a quite a mouth) but also endearing, hopeful, lovable. The characters finding love aren't of Doris Day/Rock Hudson perfection but of damaged confidence, both completely lost in this game called life. It's a rom-com so real it's hard to even call it a rom-com, with the story unforced, the eventual marriage hasty enough to make even us have inhibitions. Minnie and Seymour are not conventionally likable (she's untrustworthy to the irritating max, he's so hot-tempered it's a wonder anyone talks to him), but because they're so much better together, their union is one of rare affection that suggests they really do love each other, though not in the way Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard taught us. Cassavetes dedicated "Minnie and Moskowitz" to the people who married for love, not comfort, and it's a worthy sanctification.

His other films are extraordinarily realistic, mostly telling stories of middle-aged people facing a cruel case of mid-life crisis blues. Here, it's the opposite: the middle-aged people face a cruel case of mid-life crisis blues before they find romance; and after they find their special someone, they are renewed. They become whole again after years of trying to find themselves. With its mostly improvised dialogue and no-holds-barred performances, "Minnie and Moskowitz" should be uncomfortable. But being the voyeur to a trial of love is an easy job, and Cassavetes lets his optimism shine through. Rowlands and Cassel are terrific.