Cast

Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, John Cassavetes, Tim Carey, Katherine Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands

Film description

Cassavetes’ films quite often include scenes featuring abuse of women. Women are mocked (Shadows), objectified (Faces), and even beaten (Husbands). From that perspective, Minnie and Moskowitz is one of the director’s most painful movies. It tells the story of a sudden and unexpected love between two completely different people. Minnie is a typical middle class citizen. She is educated, elegant, and polite. Seymour Moskowitz is a hippie type. Although grown-up, he still lives with his mother. Ray Carney suggests that to show their love, Cassavetes uses the screwball comedy formula, very popular in U.S. cinema of the 1930s. In those movies, filmmakers showed how it was possible for two different people to become a couple. Following that interpretation and taking advantage of it, Cassavetes not only used the screwball comedy formula, but also deconstructed it, showing the hypocrisy of its latent ideology. Through Minnie and Moskowitz, Cassavetes asks a question that continues to confound psychologists and sociologists forty years later: why do women, in spite of everything, decide to get married?

Elżbieta Durys