Well, I was waiting for the 70s project to give Rainer's most famous film a viewing, but didn't feel like delaying gratification for yet another year after the unexpected delay. I'm glad I didn't, as
Film About a Woman Who... is in all likelihood her magnum opus.
The film comically simplifies itself as being thematically comprised of "social interactions about seduction"- but this self-reflexively only grasps a piece of the surface, and a misinterpreted one at that; a misinterpretation likely born as much from Rainer's surrogate's own delusions as the audience's inability to fully grasp the intangible expressions of her consciousness.
Like all her films, this film is centered around
ambivalence: from confused internal psychological parts vying with a complex social environment, and a puzzling ambiguity around the intrinsic or externally-produced value of emotions, memory, tactile or observed experience and their signifiers. Feelings are facts, but also insular and subjective truths. The idea of “performing” for oneself and others is a recurring motif, indicating an ambivalence over the woman expressing herself to others or hiding, to be a dominant or submissive force in a partnership, or any of the infinite binary lines of thinking and behavior that serve as prisons, breeding secondary emotions of resentment directed at the self and others. Rainer concocts an abstract study of how we respond to all stressors that trigger our discomfort - though they're not entirely negative, as the pleasure and acknowledgement of strengths coexist with the dysphoria. This is a demonstration of our deviation towards the louder parts that ‘hurt’ and reinforces a problem-focused western mentality, but doesn’t pitch it in a vacuum in actuality. There is a recognition of a 'moment' as timeless and valuable, of a 'feeling' as total, and unconditionally worth ruminating on to squeeze it of all its juice.
This film embarks on Rainer's favorite subject of a gay feminist's identity existing under the pervasive influences of a heteronormative and toxically masculine world, so these feelings and thoughts are often birthed into orbit already deterministically-conditional on how they relate to the opposite sex. At the beginning, a woman's voice often narrates a man’s internal monologues and a man narrates a woman's, jokingly nudging this out-of-body equivocation. The sexual politics are the playing field for exploration of far broader ideas - the experience of desiring to be independent from coupling, but also wanted by a man, are torn apart as this ambivalence tears her apart. The nebulous, conflicted state of wanting radical independence with intimate harmony
and social acceptance rooted in another’s utility, ingrained by the self’s need as well as society’s larger expectation, all boil down to explicitly detailed scenes as specimens, where the medium’s many possibilities of silent-film title cards and voiceover and image and music elusively attempt to define this raw experience. I love how, along with the tunnel-vision of frustration at the unknowability of one’s partner’s thoughts and feelings born from fear, comes a genuine wonder and thrill meditated on regarding this curiosity. The oscillation between mood lability is riveting in a meld of vaguely clinical and acutely poetic expression.
There’s a tragic beauty in the immediacy of this engagement, voiding the rigid harping on the futility of attempting to contain these feelings with practicality because at least she’s trying. In the process, Rainer is creating a deeply intimate relationship between viewer and content, and thus the viewer and themselves, through postmodern tactics of abstract art that channels the specific into the ubiquitous, and vice versa. Through her examination of sexual dissatisfaction in females towards men, Rainer is cueing her own confusion over her sexuality, as she would only come to fully realize and embrace her lesbianism later in life following an exhausting and depressive rejection of sex after disappointing heterosexual relationships with men, mirroring the events in this film. Even if she wasn't fully aware of her sexual preferences at this time, there is at least a subconscious hint at peripheral awareness- as Rainer directs some of this bifurcated extremism of resentment and wonder at a woman as well! A monologue about laughing at a movie and then questioning her right to do so -keeping it a secret, embarrassed about a positive internal experience with material- is devastating for its implications for a woman's insecurity when feeling feelings and thinking thoughts in the privacy of her mind, experiencing guilt in seeing herself as belonging to men and a man's world. I doubt this is implicitly metaphorically about sexuality but rather take it at face value, extending to all things- including something as trivial as having an authentic and majectic moment of laughter only to be crushed by the mass of self-doubt over the right to do so.
The list of rules near the end encapsulates all the varied and contradictory yet true emotions, and feels both empowered by and critical of them at once, just like the spectrum of self-consciousness populating the fabric of this film, and Rainer’s always-developing lifelong ethos. She allows herself the wish fulfillment of breaking free from the submission to men literally and abstractly, and this is never more hilariously and directly conveyed than the final title card prior to the film’s denouement (spoiler-boxed for size, but also NSFW language), before two paired silent scenes of pulsating seriousness and playful laughter
The spirited clips juxtaposing movement in running and dance vs. shots of characters stagnantly sitting leans heavily in favor of the former assertions of agility, an optimistic pronouncement of the ethos through a commitment to continuous engagement. Rainer has liberated herself to fight another day and lean into gratitude for minute by encapsulating moments through art, and therapeutically grown a little in the process- though a particular invasive face that briefly disrupts the rhythm of observed movement shows, with increased acceptance but not surrender, that this feeling is not a permanent escape, and progress is not linear; hence the need to exercise these philosophical and psychosocial muscles indefinitely. Oh, hey Godard! The important piece is that Rainer returns to the movement.
The 'actual' ending though is rather cynical, irreverently pairing freedom with ignorance; specifically the ignorance of believing an objective sustained truth of 'feeling' love for a partner that's just abused you with the freedom to remain static in a problematic situation. Rainer appears to be admitting her own enticement with the simple tangibility of taking her identified role in a man's world, remaining complacent in deplorable heterosexual unions. There is an understandable allure to resisting the pain from going against the grain of friction on a hazy path towards an unknown catharsis- remembering that accounts suggest Rainer was not aware of her sexual preferences in '74; or more generally, the serenity of assuming a 'non-thinking' position offers reprieve from mental self-flagellation, and yet Rainer finds thought art that she is tormented by this in practice. She cannot evade her predicament for now, but in this sobriety can work towards the goal. In the meantime, we can always find a happy ending of ephemeral sublime in an image of the ocean. That is, if we end the film there, but who wants to do that when we can keep on going?
