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A common friend's sudden death brings three men, married with children, to reconsider their lives and ultimately leave the country together. But mindless enthusiasm for regained freedom will be short-lived.
Husbands is a survey of the male midlife crisis as depicted by three friends who abandon home, country, responsibility, civility, and sanity when confronted with their own mortalities in the wake of a beloved friend’s death.
It cannot be overstated how alienating this experience was for me, a woman. Seeing John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk traipse about New York City and London in madcap fashion on the hunt for booze and cooze wasn’t exactly an unfamiliar antic in the tropes of film (or in the lives of ordinary people), but it was the potency of their iniquities that induced in me at turns woeful embarrassment, anxious alarm, putrid disgust, rankled confusion, tearful shame, and vacant hollowness. They show their…
Feels less like a film and more like a sociological examination of male relationships - the relationships men have with women, the relationships men have with each other, and the relationships that men have with themself. These men are fundamentally unable to sincerely communicate grief to each other, unable to sincerely communicate their guilt and sadness, they can barely understand the world around them - not even their wives and families - because of how deeply they understand each other. They’ve created their own language of communicating with each other - through joking, through drinking, through aggression - but rarely if ever through genuine expression.
The scenes in the hotel room, in which each of the men is paired off…
i think about what Cassavetes said about Love Streams more in relation to Husbands: that it was "so psychologically dangerous, lonely, terrifying and so uncommercial" that they "pretended [they] had a comedy."
indeed, as the tagline says: "a comedy about life, death, and freedom."
so incredibly real and painful like everything else i've seen from cassavetes. it's definitely called husbands because the three of them are married to each other.
Pseudo humanist cinephilia loves to misreads the famous The Rules of the Game quote about everybody having their reasons, but it is Cassavetes ouvre that perfect illustrates it without no distance, just a matter that his camera remain closer and understanding no matter what or who its filming. Husbands is one of the most generous of all movies right there from having the credits in two democratic cards that include the name of everyone who worked on it. "A comedy about love, death and freedom" the secondary title announces. very fairly; It is pretty funny, very desperate rage again the passing of time. men acting childish and bullysh without Cassavetes camera never taking any distance. We just remain there close to them and their personal abyss.
"Well I'm not going home; I'm going to get very drunk."
Methinks the title for John Cassavetes' fifth feature Husbands might be a little ironic. The private world of three married professional men (played by Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes) is suddenly destabilized by the death of a fourth friend, intimated to be the linchpin of their tight social circle. The remaining trio appear deeply stung by the superficial vacuity of the funeral service, though one may reasonably assume that their collective pique actually has more to do with the precipitous intrusion of mortality upon the psyches of these trim, middle-class suburbanites. Enmeshed between unprocessed grief and unexamined codes of atavistic masculinity, the bereaved husbands impulsively decide that a…
What happens when you try to kick it with the bros in your mid 40s, etc...but jokes aside this is a very dark and actually profound examination of the limits of cameraderie - a movie about the value of duties, responsibilities, obligations etc, because of its absence.
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