On the Year 1978: New York City, The Unmarried Woman on Swan Lake: From “Girlfriends” to “Paint of Happiness”

Back to New York City in 1978: I hadn’t seen Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends,” which stars Melanie Mayron as a photographer sorting out her life after her roommate moves out and gets married. I loved it. I was able to figure things out on my own with movies like Ellen Burstyn in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Broken English”. The films about people who are blue taking precautions not to be was a good one. A change in location can change perspective in a way that is largely dictated by geography.

“An Unmarried Woman” is, disappointingly, not available to stream, and I found myself scrounging for YouTube scraps, looking for other movies that would inspire the same mood. Maybe an escape into French cinema would do the trick for me, I thought after watching the Criterion Channel. I struck out in the hot sun of Roger Vadim’s 1956 Jacques Deray’s 1969 movie “La Piscine” did not offer the cozy characters or the complex characters that I was looking for.

Last week I wrote about seasonal ambivalence, about trying to be comfortable in the cold in-between. My mood was as dark and icy as the weather and I wanted to change it decisively, so I turned to my cultural diet. What would it look like to create a syllabus for optimism? I had a scene in mind: Jill Clayburgh dancing to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in her New York City apartment in Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman.” I haven’t seen the 1978 film since I was a teenager, but that scene stayed with me: exuberant, silly, creative, full of possibility.

To establish itself, the year keeps getting its bearings. The year to come still consists of a collection of post-Holiday weeks, getting-going weeks and weeks for planning. We get up to speed at an on ramp. Soon we will be in the flow of traffic, and then we will be on our way.