On how John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974) uses performance to say something about performance.

Cassavetes' films are about people performing their roles — as spouses, parents, friends — and the breakdowns that occur when people are no longer capable of sustaining the performance.

Gena Rowlands' Mabel is the center of A Woman Under the Influence: a woman whose behavior is identified as mental illness but whose actual crime seems to be excessive need and excessive feeling in an environment that has not figured out what to do with them.

The film is structured in a way that refuses to pathologize Mabel from the outside. We're close to her perspective throughout, which means that her behavior reads as the excess that the situation generates rather than as the symptom of individual illness. The film's implicit question is: what would this woman need that she doesn't have? The answer — freedom from the performance of 'wife' and 'mother' as defined by the men around her — is stated in the film's form even when it can't be stated by any character.

Peter Falk's performance as her husband Nick is deliberately ambivalent: he loves her, he is driving her mad, he is doing his best, and his best is insufficient. Cassavetes is not condemning Nick. He's showing how a certain kind of love, offered within a certain kind of constraint, destroys what it loves.