Paean to Gena
A meditation after watching Opening Night (1977)
This year I have made my first foray into John Cassavetes’ films. I started with A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and went on recently with Opening Night. I feel like I have so much to say about it and Gena Rowlands’ performance but I’ll keep it to just the below.
I don't know you, but I think I do. It feels like I know the people you play on screen. I first encountered you unknowingly, in a rom com favourite of my early adolescence that was probably one of the first films to make me weep. I found you again later, only this year, and you stunned across the decades and distance.
Here are the things that I know about you, that I know that I love about you, even if I don't know you as yourself. I can't now, anyway.
Your enviably bouncy curls. How do you get so much volume at the root and also make it all so uniformly sweep in a wave at the back of your head? You must tell me your styling secrets sometime.
The way you can drag a purse around like a chore.
How you suck on cigarettes with your bottom lip all protruded like a sweet fish or a baby needing something.
Related: just how well you smoke. It’s never looked better, or more like a crutch.
How your forehead wrinkles and it can mean a million and one things.
Your smile that invites sympathy as much as it keeps sympathy at bay, is a shield between you and your interlocutor from them really getting to know what you want.
How you can look so vulnerable that you might as well be a five year old in a grown woman's body. I often want to scoop you up and hold you but that wouldn’t do at all.
How your hair is blonde but also no colour at all and also the most beautiful colour I've ever seen.
Your chin jutting in a look that could be petulant but is softened by the crease of your eyebrows trying so hard to meet.
The shapes you make with your hands next to your face, birds or scaffolds.
The sharp 90-degree angle of your thumb from the clenched fist of your hand as it points an impossible way out behind your head, the squelching putter of your mouth as it makes an accompanying sound.
How in command of your body you are, how you can transform instantly from being entirely at home in it to a posture as if you are holding your own body away from yourself, holding your own body at a distance: shoulders forwards, arms apart, never hunched but certainly forwards.
How the camera might follow you and train itself on you and pick up every last crease and corner but you remain essentially unknowable, unpredictable, a mystery I always want more of.
The way you pronounce the ‘wh’ in ‘what’. Making sure both letters have the chance to be heard.
Your shouting.
How flat your vowels are. Yours is the kind of accent I would like to chew on.
How you never lie to me. Or haven't so far.