I saw this movie years ago, in what context I don't remember, and in the years since I've thought about aspects of it again and again. It's interestingly made, with strong subjectivity for its central female character and usefully jolting editing. I think it tries to toe the line of didacticism, rather than crossing it willfully. But it's a bit too easy to accuse both the novel and the book of preaching moral purity, even if the consequences of impurity happen to unusually complex characters.
Seeing it again, after more life experience/reading/watching, I didn't find it much less compelling. I thought some of the drama was overplayed, that Diane Keaton was nothing short of miraculous (her phone calls were more interesting than most actors' dialogue!), and that the second half dragged and spent too much time in her apartment. The final scene was so stunning, so unique, so disturbing.
It was very distant from Rossner's book, which I read earlier this year. The book was much more gradual, and it was very careful to make Theresa passive (without making her boring - a difficult trick), while Keaton's version had a much stronger personality. It laid the groundwork for Theresa's troubles in great detail with unpleasant backstory and resistance to religion, and I think that was more Rossner's experiment: poking around in the world of Roseann Quinn, the real-life woman who was killed at random after picking up a man in a bar, trying to figure out what made her tick. The film was more about the world around Theresa than the world inside her. That makes it quite useful for my project, even if it made Rossner unhappy.
The film repeatedly juxtaposes partying with violence, culminating in a sex + death extravaganza to rival Argento. Unraveling the misogyny from the feminism in all this is tougher than it looks. I could accuse Rossner of building the story so that Theresa "deserves it," so that she is complicit in her own rape and murder. Or I could argue that Theresa has a death drive buried in her libido - very Catholic, and very particular to this character rather than allegorical for liberated women. I could say that the book & movie expose that the singles scene in the 70s was dangerous to women but not men. That they expose how menacing "free love" has become a decade on, how mixing fuzzy sexual identity with drugs with casual sex leads to violence and mayhem, not happiness. That the whole point of Looking for Mr. Goodbar (and possibly Saturday Night Fever, while we're at it) is the hollowness of this kind of satisfaction, how it doesn't go anywhere but back to itself.
There's a lot here. It's a stew, difficult to analyze in sum rather than one ingredient at a time.
I rewatched it just after rewatching Saturday Night Fever. They reminded me of each other. It would be a mistake to reduce 1977 to these two films; in terms of films with lasting artistic merit, it's a year of tremendous depth, and I'm learning that in popular films it's that way too. I thought this pair of films said most of what there was to say about how free-range adults lived in this moment - sex, dance, drugs, pessimism. But this year also has a lot of fun and adventure and deep thinking in it, too. The Goodbye Girl, as charming as they come, is set in the same city as these two films, after all (and yeah, Marsha Mason gets dramatically mugged in Goodbye Girl, but it's still New York in 1977, go figure). So is Annie Hall, for which Keaton won an Oscar, and which honestly she should have gotten for this performance instead.
I knew Fever and Goodbar had a lot in common but that this one was a lot darker, and boy, was I right about that. The R-rated version of SNF is pretty goddamn dark, but this is a downer of a film, ending starkly, in blood and blackness. Recommended.
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