Shirley Soffer

Embodying Rainer’s aesthetic rigor and wit, the film combines fiction and documentary, script readings, dance snippets, still photos, and tableaux vivants to explore issues of power and gender that influence the emotional lives of her performers.

Rainer’s landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.