A Woman Under The Influence

Mabel Longhetti is an inscrutable, emotionally vulnerable woman as she goes through the rituals of everyday life: preparing for an evening alone with her husband Nick, flirting with a receptive bar patron, meeting her children at the school bus stop. There is a pervasive undercurrent of volatility in her personality, perhaps symptomatic of a surfacing instability, that invariably cause people to withdraw from her. We see a glimpse of her despair as she seeks reassurances from her family that she is a good mother. But it is soon evident that she is collapsing under the weight of her private demons, her own self-induced influences, and Nick makes the agonizing decision to have her institutionalized. (www.filmref.com)

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