Cassavetes: The Other Woman (2014)

Over the last few years, the romantic comedy has slackened somewhat as a genre – it’s become harder and harder to find its fantasies of the good life plausible, reassuring or even romantic. Like so many romantic comedies seeking to survive that slump, The Other Woman opens in a cynical, brittle, corporate mode – it’s set against a high-end, denuded, washed-out New York that makes you realise, with a start, just how uncharismatic this city has become over the last cinematic decade. Within that milieu, we’re presented with a ruthless lawyer, played by Cameron Diaz, who finds out that her lover, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, is married. The last thing she wants to do is spend time with his wife, played by Leslie Mann – but that’s just what happens, as the two are thrown into an unlikely alliance that gradually expands to include Kate Upton, the third lover in the picture. And it’s at this point that the film changes tack for a warmer, more inclusive comedy about female friendship – unlike the opening scenes, the remainder plays out as a series of montage sequences, or music videos, often in slow motion, as Cassavetes draws out the gestures and micro-gestures of female friendship in ways that quite startlingly betray his father’s influence, perhaps for the first time in his career. Time and again, he nails the choreography and blocking of female closeness, using it as the foundation for a screwball zaniness that offers Mann and Diaz quite unprecedented and unusual opportunities for eccentric physical comedy; they are nearly always clinging, climbing or clambering over each other, like a miscued conga line, or a syncopated conversation, forever awkward and awry. By the end, it’s more like an oddball reimagination of 9 To 5 than anything promised by the opening scenes, especially since the women all turned out to have been financially as well as romantically duped by the same man. And, like 9 To 5, it’s restless with its own tropes, anxious to eviscerate itself from the inside, which works perfectly with Coster-Waldau’s migration from Game of Thrones – the violent ending is more than worthy of Westeros, while still comically commensurate with the women’s fears, fantasies and friendships, and it’s in that flexibility that the film’s restless charm resides.