MURDER and murder

Winner of the Berlinale’s 1997 Teddy Award for Best Documentary/Essay, Yvonne Rainer’s final feature is also her most personal and playful.

Closely echoing Rainer’s own situation at the time of filming, Doris (Joanna Merlin) is a crunchy single mother in her early 60s who works in the arts and has recently come out as a lesbian, shacking up with Mildred (Kathleen Chalfant) – a younger, tenured academic who is introduced by her partner as “a WASPy, high-minded, stubborn, professional dyke”. Occasionally interrupting is another couple who can’t be seen or heard by the two women: Doris’s dead mother (Isa Thomas) and an 18-year-old version of Mildred (Catherine Kellner), first seen together goofing around at Coney Island before offering their observations on the lives around them, as well as their own.

The varied individual attitudes of Doris and Mildred, which run the gamut from dinner to clothing to parties, chafe between the two as viewers watch them bicker, joke and love in their day-to-day duties of coupledom. When Doris is diagnosed with breast cancer, she obsesses over medical facts and retreats from Mildred, who tries to find connection; their prickly relationship moves from the dinner table to a literal boxing ring. All the while, Rainer appears as herself throughout, dressed in a tuxedo and talking straight to the camera, at one point revealing her own mastectomy scar.

An exploration of ageing, housekeeping and homosexuality, this furious, darkly funny and urgent film truly marries the personal and political.

“A vivid collage of reality and fiction … Through irony, slapstick, visual metaphors, literary quotations and running commentary, Rainer’s characteristic montage of formal devices deconstructs some challenging ideas.” – Variety