An Unmar­ried Woman and the pow­er of female agency

Eggs with hot sauce, danc­ing in your pants, gos­sip­ing over wine with your besties. Despite being released in 1978, Paul Mazursky’s An Unmar­ried Woman con­tains many images that will res­onate with Mil­len­ni­al view­ers. Yet even more rel­e­vant is the way the film’s char­ac­ters own up to and name their feel­ings. Anx­i­ety, anger, lone­li­ness, sad­ness, dis­ori­en­ta­tion, hap­pi­ness. All of these emo­tions are not only felt by dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters through­out the film but dis­cussed at inti­mate length.

Rad­i­cal for its time, An Unmar­ried Woman cen­tres on a female pro­tag­o­nist who is allowed to be all of these things at once. The woman in ques­tion, Eri­ca Ben­ton (played by Jill Clay­burgh), is a hotbed of con­tra­dic­to­ry emo­tions. This is fre­quent­ly observed by the var­i­ous men in her life, who com­plain that she gives them a headache or is ​“curi­ous” and ​“com­pli­cat­ed.”

Even when she becomes sin­gle, Eri­ca is nev­er sin­gu­lar. Her expres­sions are always mul­ti­fac­eted. After an emo­tion­al­ly tur­bu­lent day in which she dis­cov­ers that her hus­band, Mar­tin (Michael Mur­phy), has decid­ed to move in with a 26-year-old he met buy­ing a shirt in Bloom­ing­dales, Eri­ca catch­es sight of her puffy-eyed face in the mir­ror. She con­tem­plates it and groans, pulling her chin down with dis­sat­is­fac­tion. Then she snort-laughs and exhales, reveal­ing a stee­li­ness to her char­ac­ter with the line, ​“Balls said the Queen! If I had ​’em I’d be King!”

Mazursky’s direc­tion empha­sis­es the ebb and flow of emo­tion­al recov­ery. Eri­ca is often shown in motion – jog­ging, danc­ing, ice-skat­ing, or sim­ply undress­ing – and there are sev­er­al instances where the cam­era tracks and then cir­cles around her. After learn­ing of her husband’s betray­al, the cam­era pulls back as Eri­ca walks down the street, her face frozen in open-mouthed shock.

It then piv­ots, fol­lows and even­tu­al­ly over­takes her in a 360 manœu­vre that con­veys the vom­it-induc­ing dis­ori­en­ta­tion she is expe­ri­enc­ing. Lat­er, when the dark­ness appears to be lift­ing with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of new pas­tures and romance, Eri­ca goes ice-skat­ing. As she glides along the ice, so the cam­era rotates to gid­dy­ing effect.

Couple’s ther­a­pist and pod­cast host Esther Per­el recent­ly gave an inter­view in which she declared that love was ​“not a per­ma­nent state of enthu­si­asm… it’s a verb… an active engage­ment with all kinds of feel­ings.” An Unmar­ried Woman recog­nis­es that. Erica’s mar­riage is depict­ed as an inter­play of con­ver­sa­tion, frus­tra­tion and pas­sion, in which she and Mar­tin seemed at once bored by and ador­ing of each oth­er, often with­in the space of a few min­utes. The film is imbued with Perel’s sense of imper­ma­nence and flu­id­i­ty. As Eri­ca says, she is ​“try­ing” to be an inde­pen­dent woman. It is a verb and thus an ongo­ing process.

This notion of flu­id­i­ty is true not just of Eri­ca. One of her best friends, Elaine (Kel­ly Bish­op), is straight-talk­ing and sar­don­ic. ​“Does she fuck him or does she adopt him?,” she asks of anoth­er friend hav­ing an affair with a 19-year-old. Lat­er, she mus­es on the ben­e­fits of hav­ing a ​“pure sex” rela­tion­ship: ​“I like my job, my friends, my hol­i­days.” And yet she is also grant­ed a moment of qui­et despair in which she admits to hav­ing shat­tered self-esteem and is reliant on the sup­port of her friends to pick her back up. The con­tra­dic­to­ry nature of human emo­tions is con­stant­ly on dis­play. ​“You can be a bas­tard and have tal­ent,” says Erica’s new lover of a fel­low artist with wan­ton ways and a pen­chant for step­ping over the line.

The title of Noah Baumbach’s Mar­riage Sto­ry sim­i­lar­ly alludes to a sense of ongo­ing­ness. It sit­u­ates the dra­ma in the present tense and sig­nals an unfold­ing of events. Where­as ​‘divorce’ or even ​‘break up’ can imply a bruis­ing final­i­ty, or even some­thing explo­sive, ​‘mar­riage sto­ry’ sounds like some­thing that might con­tin­ue long after the mat­ri­mo­ny has been legal­ly dis­solved. An Unmar­ried Woman exists in the same mer­cu­r­ial realm. Eri­ca was a mar­ried woman, and now she is undo­ing and unlearn­ing that sense of self. As her ther­a­pist wise­ly notes, ​“Your life has been dis­rupt­ed and dis­com­bob­u­lat­ed… [this is] a new life.”

Watch­ing the film in light of my own unwant­ed break-up, and the sub­se­quent few months where it felt like liv­ing inside a wash­ing machine, I felt a deep­er con­nec­tion to Eri­ca. I haven’t been try­ing to extri­cate myself from a 16-year mar­riage, but that idea of dis­com­bob­u­la­tion, of laugh­ter co-min­gling with sad­ness and rage co-exist­ing with retained affec­tion for that per­son is incred­i­bly on point.

The process behind let­ting some­thing val­ued and unique behind is an uphill slog. There will be days where your lone­li­ness doesn’t feel quite so bit­ter, or the thought of going home with a rel­a­tive stranger not quite so repel­lent. There will be days when you dance in your pants and laugh so uncon­trol­lably that a dif­fer­ent genre of tears glaze your cheeks. I’ve found there are days that encom­pass the spec­trum of emo­tion so vio­lent­ly it’s enough to give you whiplash. An Unmar­ried Woman is cin­e­mat­ic ther­a­py, nev­er more so than when Erica’s actu­al ther­a­pist tells her, ​“It’s okay to feel lone­ly… It’s okay to feel any­thing… It’s okay to feel.”