The Man who Envied Women
With the unique style that has characterised her four previous features, Yvonne Rainer explores the issues of sexuality, ageing, power relations and political activism. Around a familiar theme – the break up of a marriage – Rainer constructs an honest, graceful and wickedly funny account of a self-satisfied womaniser. He is Jack Deller, the man 'who knows almost too much about women'. Is he a feminist – or a coloniser?
‘The Man who Envied Women’ is a film about the oppositions we create not only between the sexes but between theory and action, the conscious and the unconscious, intellect and emotion, and our personal and global concerns.
In their multilevelled disjointed style, Rainer's films revive the lessons of Duchamp, the Cubists, even the epic, to create melodramas for our time, works which address the fractured sensibility of anyone living in the difficult world of modern urban culture.
– B Ruby Rich
Description source: Cinenova Catalogue (1994). Edited by Kate Norrish. Editorial committee: Elaine Burrows, Liane Harris, Helen de Witt