Since watching “Love Streams” from Cassavetes with his then wife Gena Rowlands and admiring her strong performance I consider Rowlands as one of the finest american film divas from the ranks of Elisabeth Tailor.

She is very good in her role in Woody Allen’s “Another Woman” (US 1988). I can relate to her melancholic feelings and her difficult temper, which apparently left it’s traces in her entourage. Things she said, judgments she made about people. Her friends are not all on “her side” and as so often in Allen’s NYC films, psychology personified in a psychiatrist/psychologist plays an important role.

In “Another Woman” the fifty year old Marion is a rather successful Dean of philosophy at a woman’s college and rents an apartment to work undisturbed on a new book. Through a ventilation grid she eavesdrops on her neighbour: a psychologist. Listening to the most intimate confessions she is especially struck by Hope, who is pregnant and has existential questions.

These therapy sessions trigger Marion’s own reflection on “how her unemotional attitude towards the people around her affected them and herself” (IMDb).

A must see in Allen’s filmography, if not for him then surely for Gena Rowlands, a world class actress.