Opening Night (Cassavetes, 1977)
My Fall Movies # 25
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If theatre and cinema are always present in Cassavetes’ films, caught in a process of reciprocal exchange, why, we might ask, does he feel the need to literalise this scenario in The killing of a Chinese bookie and Opening night? These two films reveal something rarely associated with Cassavetes: an attempt to theorize the impulses and drives at work in his films. This theorisation, however, does not take place somewhere apart from the films; it emerges in tandem with the work of performance. By turning towards the world of theatre, Cassavetes is not taking a step away from cinema but looking at it from a certain vantage point, taking in a particular truth of the work. […]
in Opening night we are lead along by a series of echoes and possible connections from one scenario to the next, from the drama on stage to the drama that takes place in the world surrounding the theatre. Myrtle’s ex-lover Maurice (Cassavetes) plays her lover on stage. There are also references to Myrtle’s past involvements with both the director and producer of the play. From the snippets of The second woman that we see in performance and rehearsal, it seems that Myrtle’s stage character Virginia is also caught between various relationships and emotional dilemmas.
As a result of this echoing and doubling of roles, it is at times impossible to tell when the actors are sticking to the script or reflecting on their lives. The script that guides the performances is less a stable index of the events unfolding on stage than a complex network of allusions and coincidences that, as is the case for Myrtle, leaves one dizzy and out of sorts. Early on in the rehearsals Maurice tells Myrtle, «I was very much in love with you, Virginia»; and she replies, «When was that? I really want to know». From the tone of her voice and Maurice’s bemused and evasive response, we assume that the rehearsal has broken down and Myrtle is reflecting upon her relationship with Maurice. It is only later, when these remarks are repeated during an actual performance, that we realize Myrtle’s comments are in fact part of the script. This continual rewriting of expectations and responses ensures that the dilemmas presented in the film are not just Myrtle’s; they are incorporated into the very process and structure of the film. As Laurence Giavarini puts it: «[t]here are not two scripts in Opening night, a theatre fiction and a film fiction, but a single script with an assumed ambivalence, a deliberate, voluntary ambivalence equally valid for on stage and off-stage and which makes up the one visual space of the film.» (More here.)
